Scissor Skills

It takes time and practice to learn how to use scissors. How old should a child be when scissors are introduced? Believe it or not, according to Kimberly Wiggins an Occupational Therapist, a child who is following the appropriate developmental track should start cutting at the age of 2 years old. Using scissors helps in the development of fine motor skills.  Tiny muscles in the palm of their hand develop with the continuous open and close motion. These are the same muscles that are required for writing. Cutting also promotes hand-eye coordination, a skill that is necessary for zipping up a coat, doing up a button, using a fork or throwing/catching a ball.                                                        In my experience children enjoy cutting a variety of items and are motivated to cut things such as playdough, straws (they are fun for the beginner because they are not floppy and kids love that the pieces go flying when snipped) yarn, coloured construction paper and old magazines.                                                                                                              The children in this picture are a preschool group from Tillsonburg Little school and they are using their scissor skills to cut up grocery store flyers. Not all of them wanted to cut out their favourite foods to make a menu, some of them simply wanted to cut up the flyer because they could. Look how focused and engaged they are in this easy activity.      I encourage you to try it with your little ones.

Loose Parts & Play dough

Last Tuesday was Halloween and the Ingersoll Ontario Early Years Centre celebrated with Black & Orange day. On one table the facilitator had put out orange play dough and a variety of loose parts. Loose parts are materials that can be carried, moved, lined up, taken apart, put back together and combined with other materials. Loose parts can be used in any way that a child chooses to use them. The use of loose parts supports the use of a child’s imagination. In the picture below you can see what one 3-year-old created with some of the available loose parts. It was her “Halloween Happy Face”.

Yes, loose parts can be messy. Yes, having them out can create more work for the teacher or parent. Yes they can and should be used with other materials and often do not stay where they started out, making for more work at tidy time.  One little boy took the ping-pong type eye-ball over to the sensory bin, put rice inside one and then closed it up to make a shaker.  No one asked him to make a shaker. That was being creative!

“The wider the range of possibilities we offer children, the more intense will be their motivations and the richer their experiences”  – Loris Malaguzzi