How to Cut with Scissors: Montessori Cutting Strips

Cutting paper is a great activity for children to develop fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination and promote concentration. Below you can find a printable PDF with 13 different cutting patterns for your child to practice!

Target ages: 2 ½ to 4 ½ years old.

The Montessori Cutting Strips

When I was teaching in a Montessori school, we had this cutting strips on the shelf for children to practice cutting. The children loved practice with them and it was a material that was used every day! What I most love about this activity is that it has different levels of difficulty, so if your child is younger you can start with the blank strip and just practice the movement of opening and closing the scissors in order to cut without worrying about cutting any lines. When they are a bit older and have more control over their movements, they can then do the more challenging patterns like zig-zag or curved lines.

Another thing we use to do after cutting these strips is, instead of just throwing the pieces of paper away, we will save them to later use them to make collages.

In the printable PDF you will find 13 different patterns for your child to practice. There are some patters that, after your child has cut them, they can also use them to make crowns. My children at school, specially loved this and they often made several for all of the members of their family! 😉 I love when we can use simple activities like this one and engage our children in further work with them.

After looking all over the internet I haven’t found the same patterns I use to have in my classroom, so I made these so that you can use them too! You can download these patters here.

Which Scissors Should Your Child Use?

Imagine cutting vegetables or meat with a knife that doesn’t cut well, kind of dangerous, right?

When children start cutting, parents tend to be a bit afraid of giving their children real scissors and they give them scissors that are made of plastic or that just don’t cut very much. These kind of scissors, at the end, are more dangerous than normal scissors. I will suggest that you give your child scissors that have a blunt tip but that are sharp enough to cut paper well. It can also be very frustrating for children to try to cut a piece of paper and not being able because the scissors don’t work properly.

It is also good to consider if your child is right or left handed. Nowadays there are also scissors for both right and left handed children that we normally have in the classroom so that all children are able to use them.

Different Cutting Strips Patterns and How to Use them

To prepare these cutting strips you will:

• Print each page single-sided.
• Print each page on different colored paper (optional). I like to do this to make them more interesting and to also visually differentiate them.
• Prepare the strips by cutting each one at the dotted line.

The patterns that you will find in this PDF are organized from easiest to more difficult. This will give you an idea of where to start with your child and what comes after.

The “blank strips” are used the first ones in the classroom for small children that are starting to use scissors. If you observe that your child has difficulty cutting these black strips, perhaps is better to print them in carboard paper instead of normal paper.

I find when children are starting to cut it is easier for them to cut on carboard because it doesn’t fold so easily like normal paper do. When you see they are starting to get more comfortable with the scissors you can them change back to paper.

These longer and thicker strips are the ones my children used in the classroom to make crowns. After your child has cut the strips, join the two pieces together with tape to make a crown. Show this to your child and let them be creative!

These last two patters are the harder ones, so your child would have had a lot of practice with the others ones first.

Montessori Cutting Strips Presentation

Materials:

• Scissors with blunt tip
• Prepared cutting strips
• A small container to hold the cut pieces of paper
• A tray to carry the materials

Age: 2 ½ – 4 ½

Presentation:

1. Show your child how to hold the scissors properly.
2. Show your child how you cut one of the strips of paper and put the pieces on the container.
3. Invite your child to continue cutting the rest of the strips.
4. Fade and observe.

Conclusion

Children love working with their hands; it is how they learn and reach concentration. As we give them opportunities to develop their abilities we will see that they are much more capable that we think they are.

These cutting activity is a simple way to help your child improve their fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination and concentration. Make sure to download these Cutting Strips here!