Five Activities for Scissor Practice

Five Activities for Scissor Practice Owen is now 4, and we’ve been working on perfecting those scissor skills!  Cutting can be a tricky skill for preschoolers, and so I’ve been collecting scissor practice ideas to share with all of you.

1.  Cutting playdough.  This is an easy place to start.  Cutting playdough doesn’t really require any accuracy, so it’s good for learning to grasp the scissors and get the open-and-close motion going.  We have some all-plastic scissors that came with a playdough set, and I love the fact that they are easy to wash.

It’s also fun for preschoolers to cut yarn or straws into segments.  Then you can use the straw pieces to make pattern towers!

Five Activities for Scissor Practice

2.  Make some homemade cutting worksheets.

One day, I sat down and made several scissor practice worksheets for Owen.  I made some with lines, some with shapes, and one with a snake to cut out and tape together.  During the older boys’ school, Owen can pick a page and start cutting.  This has worked really well, and he definitely like the snake page the best!

Five Activities for Scissor Practice 3.  Cut alphabet letters out of cereal boxes, etc.

Preschoolers can use the letters to make an alphabet collage or spell their names, or they can just collect the letters!  Owen liked making his name the best.

4.  Make an alphabet book.

I made Owen an alphabet book out of construction paper.  I just stapled paper together, and then wrote one letter on each page.  Owen has been looking through magazines and catalogs for things that he likes, and then I help him figure out which page he should glue it on.  We’ve been working on this a little at a time, and it has been a fun project!  He can also use the letters for tracing with his finger, which is an important pre-writing skill.

Five Activities for Scissor Practice

I discovered while we were working on that Owen tries to turn his scissors rather than turn the page he’s cutting, which doesn’t work too well.  I have been removing the page he wants from the magazine, and then encouraging him to turn the page as he cuts.

5.  Do a fun craft that involves a lot of cutting.

Here are some ideas:

Cut strips to make a countdown chain – count down to a vacation, birthday, or holiday!

Make a fish with colored tissue paper scales

Make a colorful mosaic

Practice tracing and cutting paper hearts

A Lego Cake Fail (And how the most fun parties are not always Pinterest perfect!)

Lego Cake Fail

This past Saturday, my third son celebrated his fourth birthday.  We usually only do birthday parties with invitations and friends at age 5, and we’ve decided that they can have a party again at age 10, starting with Aidan who will be 10 in July.  On the years with no parties, we celebrate with the grandparents and maybe invite another family over or do a fun outing with another family.

Owen said that he wanted a Lego birthday, and last week I saw the perfect cake on Pinterest!

This awesome Lego cake uses marshmallows

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How to Make a Duct Tape Wallet

How to make a duct tape wallet

We’ve been really into duct tape at our house lately!  First it was velcro duct tape bracelets, and now Aidan and I have moved on to duct tape wallets.  There are a lot of tutorials out there for duct tape wallets, but I thought I would go ahead and share ours since summer break is on the horizon!  Both the bracelets and the wallets would make great summer crafts for either boys or girls.

For our wallets, we used a tutorial from Crafty Nest.

We were so excited to find Superman, Mario, and Angry Birds duct tape at Target!

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Eight Real-Life Ways to Get Kids Writing

8 Real-Life Ways to Get Kids Writing

Gresham is 6, and finishing first grade.  His handwriting was so neat when he was learning to form the letters, but now that we are past learning how to write the alphabet and he can spell quite a few words, his writing has gotten faster and messier.  He is also less interested in writing.  I found this to be true for Aidan at this age too, so maybe it’s a stage?

We are working on doing a good job even if it’s not something you want to do, but at the same time, it helps to

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Dealing with Sibling Fighting and Rudeness

Dealing with Sibling Fighting and Rudeness

Ah, sibling fighting…  One of my least favorite parts of parenting!  Lately, it seems like every word out of my boys’ mouths is rude.  We have had everything from the standard fighting over toys and fighting over turns to bossing and parenting each other to showing NO grace for the most minor infractions.

It’s enough to make a mom crazy!

Unfortunately, I don’t have a magic cure for sibling fighting to offer you.  But I do want to share something that we did this week to help make God’s Word applicable to all of our lives,

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