Dear Dr. Debbie,
Our five-year-old is very much looking forward to kindergarten. In our final parent-teacher conference for preschool it was recommended that we work on helping him learn to open packages that he may be bringing for snack and lunch and to give him more practice with scissors.
I can understand that he hasn’t had much experience with a lunch box since he’s only been going half days (and school provided the snacks), but practice with scissors? We don’t have any kid scissors at home. I assumed this was something that was worked on in school.
Skills Needing Increased Practice
Dear SNIP,
One concern about the lives of young children during the initial years of the pandemic was that they’d be missing out on classroom opportunities to gain the skills needed for later success in school. A national survey of 1,500 teachers, Pre-K to 3rd grade, as reported last week in Education Week https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/young-kids-are-struggling-with-skills-like-listening-sharing-and-using-scissors/2024/06, reveals that a majority of the teachers concur that fine motor skills were better five years ago – before the pandemic – than in the fall of 2023. This could just be an ongoing decline since the advent of children’s easy access to watching screens, and the increasing screen time among young children in recent decades. Screen use generally requires minimal fine motor exertion.
Thankfully, research conducted by Johns Hopkins Children’s Center https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/study-notes-small-decline-preschool-developmental-milestones-during-pandemic of over 50,000 children, ages five and under, suggests only “modest” delays in fine motor and other skills caused by our restricted lives during the first years of the pandemic.
Fine Motor Skills
From birth, a child develops strength and coordination involving the nerves and muscles that coordinate movements in the fingers, palms and wrists. There is a typical progression that allows for readiness by kindergarten to dress himself, to use a pencil to form legible letters, to cut with scissors, and to manage his own food containers.
There are charts https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/25235-fine-motor-skills that give a timetable for the fine motor skills that should be attained in the early years. Most preschool educators incorporate opportunities to support this development in their classroom materials and activities. However there are plenty of ways that families can further enhance fine motor development.
Tearing
Give your son opportunities to work on his grip, his skills of coordination between two hands, and his muscle strength with some of these tasks:
Tear wrapping paper for a collage (use a glue stick to hold the bits onto a piece of cardboard or construction paper)
Rip lettuce for a salad
Pull apart a hunk of play dough
Yank the green leaves off an ear of fresh summer corn
If you’re still helping him in the bathroom, coach your son through getting his own toilet paper off the roll. Kindergarten students are expected to be totally independent in the bathroom.
Cutting
Invest in a decent pair of safety scissors. (Some of the less expensive ones are harder to use.) You will supervise, and perhaps coach a bit, when you first introduce him to his at-home scissors. As he gets better and better at using them, you can decide if they’re left in an area designated for art activities, or kept out of reach except when you’re available to oversee their use.
Here is a developmental sequence for cutting with scissors:
- Child holds the scissors with two hands, applying equal force with both hands. This can begin by age two. The adult can hold stiff paper (such as a page from an old magazine), a plastic drinking straw, or a long piece of play dough so the child can successfully manage the scissors with a two-handed approach.
- Child holds the scissors in his dominant hand but without regard for thumbhole vs. finger hole. The wrist is often awkwardly twisted as the child uses trial and error to effectively clamp down the blades. The same easy-to-cut materials listed above can be used, with the adult holding them at the right angle for the child to be successful.
- The scissors are in the proper position in the child’s hand, but strength still has a ways to go. At this stage the child will be successful with making snips into a sheet of construction paper, or a used envelope, or a paper plate. Many children are satisfied just making snips. The snips don’t have to “be” anything. But if you like, you can suggest grass for a collage of an outdoor scene, a lion’s mane for a paper bag puppet, or fringes to decorate a homemade Father’s Day card.
- The next stage, by around age 4, is to cut forward on a line. It starts with crooked snips until the line gets progressively smoother with practice. If he enjoys your coaching, draw a nice thick line for him to follow on the paper. Again this can be part of a project (cutting strips to weave together as a place mate, for example), or just the challenge of getting all the way across a full sheet. Also at this stage, he should be able to cut a piece of yarn if you hold it tautly in front of him. (This could be for a collage, or to make a leash for his stuffed animal.)
- As you may recall, kindergarten activities include a lot of “cut and paste” requiring the students to cut around a shape – usually a rectangle – which then gets glued onto a particular spot on a worksheet. The simpler shapers are easier to start with: triangle, rectangle, square, circle. Your son may want you to draw the shapes for him to cut or he might prefer to cut “free hand” to make shapes for a collage. If you use a hole punch for him, his shapes can be strung on a piece of yarn to make a necklace.
Practice, Practice, Practice
The nice thing about working on neural networks and muscle strength is that there are so many activities to choose from. Your son’s fine motor skills will benefit from: play dough, building blocks, toy cars, dolls, toy animals, crayons, sand play, bath toys, turning the pages of a book, and time in the kitchen with you.
Be sure to include practice with food containers that are likely to go to school with him!
Dr. Debbie
Deborah Wood, Ph.D. is a child development specialist www.drdebbiewood.com and founding director of Chesapeake Children’s Museum www.theccm.org.
The museum is open daily from 10 am to 4 pm. Summer hours are 10 am to 5 pm beginning June 14. Online reservations are available https://www.theccm.org/event-details/purchase-tickets-in-advance or call: 410-990-1993. Each Thursday there is a guided nature walk at 10:30 am. Art and Story Times with Mrs. Spears and Puppy the Puppet are on Monday mornings at 10:30 am.
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