Discovering craft scissors

Nico had been kind of obsessed with anything “cut cut”, be it scissors or knives (of course we would never even think of giving him any of that, I mean obsessed with wanting them), so when Valerie and her mom started to work on the storage room turned spare bedroom turned storage room turned craft room, we found Valerie’s collection of Fiskars craft scissors, you know the ones that make nicely fancy cuts and corners and all of that, and Nico was fascinated with them immediately. And quite frankly, how couldn’t he, since they are scissors and colourful AND so many of them!

So to kill two proverbial stones birds with one bird stone, the ladies needed some time to concentrate on moving stuff around and get sorted, while I could kind of satisfy Nico’s craving for “cut cut” and also let him discover some motor skills and aim (there goes the third stone, eh, bird), so we hauled the case downstairs, set ourselves up on the kitchen table with a stack of paper and off we went.

At first he took them all out one by one, trying to find a favourite before he even thought about using one of the scissors, but then I showed him how to properly hold the scissors and then let him start cutting into paper, where I was holding both sides to keep it taught, therefore making it easier for him to cut (so please bare with me about the relative lack of photos, but my third hand was on vacation) for the first time ever.

He tried two different approaches, one- and the two-handed and also left and right hand. Now one thing about him – he is very good with pretty much everything with the right hand, but he is obsessed with trying to do everything with his left hand. Not sure, if he’s trying to teach himself to be ambidextrous or is just a phase (one that has been lasting several months by now, mind you), but he’s doing everything both ways.

It took him a little to get used to how the scissors worked, but with me keeping tension on the paper, he figured it out pretty quickly and after a little bit, he started to cut on his own and fairly straight, too!

What started out as a way of keeping him busy turned out to be way more than that, since we worked on motor skills, also safety (I showed him to only grab the scissors by the handle, even if they are closed) and aiming/cutting pretty straight, kept him busy for almost 40 minutes, which is a toddler eternity Since then he has graduated to cutting with real children’s scissors (of course ALWAYS under supervision) and while he still likes cutting, it seems like he got at least some of it out of his system.

If you do this, we’d LOVE to see a photo of it. Email it to us or post it on our Facebook page. We’d love to do a Facebook album, a Pinterest board and a page of your creations

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