Cutting and Pasting Activity for Fine Motor Skills
Emotional Development for Preschoolers
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 and hands.
You can make this activity more interesting by having the children glue their favorite drinks on a Styrofoam cup and food on paper plates/bowls.
*When finished, simply store any extra images in an envelope for use at a later date with the preschool children or young children in your class. These cut out objects could also be laminated and kept for years while building your collection of teaching resources.
This is a simple activity to get children excited about cutting using scissors. This helps with the development of their fine motor skills. Having the children find all their favorite things to eat helps with their emotional and social development as they talk about all their favorites.
You may even want to discuss different foods, favorite foods and snacks with the children. Get creative, make it fun and different and children will love it.