Fine Motor Skills

Cutting and Pasting Activity for Fine Motor Skills Emotional Development for Preschoolers Preschool aged children benefit greatly from learning activities like cutting and pasting activities like those below, which help in the development of fine motor skills and emotional development. Preschoolers and young children are fascinated by different varieties of food and they of course, like adults, have their favorite foods, drinks, snacks and treats. Why not turn that into a fun cutting and pasting activity for fine motor skills development? But how? Check out this simple, fun activity that will help familiarize pre k children with different types of food & snacks, all while developing their fine motor skills using scissors, cutting and pasting and simple identification. Cutting & Pasting for Food Recognition: Flyers, old magazines, newspapers and calendars are great places to find numerous pictures and images of meats, fruits, vegetables, desserts, candy, cereals and more to use for this kids activity. Using these old newspapers and magazines is also great for the environment. It’s always a good idea to use old materials like these for images and information which you can use to make your preschool tools and activities. Recycling is always a good idea and it teaches the children good habits. What You Want to Do for this Preschool Activity: Provide child scissors (yes – the ones specifically for children. They should be labeled as such and usually have rounded ends and fit a child’s small fingers) What you want to do is get an assortment of different flyers, magazines and newspapers full of different images of various food types.   Different Options for this Fine Motor Skills Development Activity for Children For this kids fine motor skills and emotional development activity, you could have the children search through flyers and newspapers and find food, drinks, and snacks that they like. Or to make it a little more challenging you could have them find ONLY the ‘meat’ products. Or Find only the ‘vegetables’ etc. When the children are searching for their own personal favorites, this helps with their ‘emotional development’ and also builds ‘food recognition skills’. The cutting, using child safe scissors, helps children to build fine motor skills which includes the building of the small muscles of the hands and fingers in children.   Obviously there are different ways that this activity can be done or even expanded on. You could even pick different ways for different children. When finished, you can keep all the food images that have been cut out and paste them on a sheet of paper and have the sheet laminated. Once laminated, you can then cut the images out again and use them for various learning and teaching activities in the preschool classroom or at home with your kids. You could even allow the children to paste the images and make a collage of their favorite foods, favorite vegetables etc. on a paper plate. This pasting and sticking also helps with fine motor development of the children’s small muscles of the fingers […]