Hair Cutting
Cutting is a great activity for building hand strength. The opening and closing motions build up the small muscles required to carry out day to day activities such as getting dressed, using cutlery and eventually writing. It also helps with bilateral coordination which is also needed to carry out most of these tasks independently.
Learning to use scissors can be quite tricky for little ones. These are a couple activities that worked for us.
Materials:
Toilet roll
Scissors
Marker
Children’s scissors (we started with the sprung Easi-Grip Scissors which are recommended by occupational therapists)
How to set up:
Take a toilet roll and cut vertical strips about 1/3 of the way down.
Draw a funny face and demonstrate how to cut the hair.
One trick when learning to use scissors is to put a little sticker on their thumb and ask them to keep the sticker pointing up.
Another activity we found helpful was cutting playdough hair. I’m not sure why every activity is about cutting hair, but they seem to love it!
After they have moved on to regular scissors, these Maped scissors were the ones that worked best for us. They are metal so require supervision, but we found it so hard to cut anything with most children’s scissors. It also comes with a spring you can use or remove, and we found them really good for learning to cut.
Our daughter was 2 years and 3 months old in these videos
Great for:
Hand-eye coordination is required in everyday tasks such as grasping objects, handwriting, playing games, eating and cooking. As with other body skills, hand-eye coordination can be practised and improved upon. This development begins in infancy.
Fine Motor Skills involve the small muscles working with the brain in order to control small movements. Developing fine motor skills helps children do things like eating, writing and getting dressed.
Bilateral coordination is when two sides of the body are being used at the same time to carry out an activity. Many daily self-care and play activities require bilateral coordination skills including eating, getting dressed, tying shoelaces, playing sports, running, walking and skipping.
Focus and concentration help children to learn. Most skills are learned by practising them over and over, so being able to block out distractions and focus on particular tasks will help the rate in which they learn.
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