Proficient scissor use requires foundational components such as postural stability, hand strength and dexterity, hand-eye coordination, bilateral integration, sensory integration, sequencing, rhythm, and attention. These are skills that are also needed for success in play and learning.

Cutting with scissors requires an incredible amount of coordination and is often a frustrating task for children to effectively learn. Cutting with scissors involves the ability to use both sides of the body at the same time to do two different things.

Cutting involves a lot more than just picking up a pair of scissors and learning how to hold them or open and close them.

Your child needs to be able to sit up appropriately and have good balance and stability. Slouching while cutting will not work. And when a child feels unbalanced, it will make holding the scissors very difficult.
They also need stable shoulders with wrist and finger control, including being able to isolate the thumb and the fingers in order to grasp and release the scissors.

Bilateral coordination, or using both sides of the body together is crucial to cutting. Using both hands together means the dominate hand opens and closes the scissors while the non-dominate hand or “helping hand” hold the paper and rotates it as needed.

This book focuses on the development of pre-scissor skills, with all activities and ideas suggested by an Occupational Therapist that you can use at home, or in the classroom.

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Judy Benz Duncan has been an Occupational Therapist for over thirty years. She has worked with children from infants to teenagers in numerous settings that included early intervention, pre-school programs, grade school, home health, developmental training centers, and sensory integration clinics.

Judy developed the foundation for designing therapeutic activities and tasks using interactive play and creative imagination to engage the children at a level they could easily relate to while working toward the achievement of their Occupational Therapy program’s functional goals and treatment plan.

Judy attended the University of Florida, University of Kansas, and the University of Tennessee. She received New York State approval as a Supplemental Evaluator for OT with early intervention and pre-school students, and has helped develop and start an OT program for families and children in New York. Judy continues to stay up-to-date in the clinical field through mentoring other OT students and new graduates.

She continues to contribute to children, families and professionals everywhere through her professional writing endeavors which include writing books and manuals, managing the therapeutic website, TheraPlay4Kids.com, writing OT blogs and topic-specific articles, working on "interactive story play" book series, writing bi-weekly professional blogs for a pediatric orthopedic surgeon group, a psychiatrist, and an attorney at law. She continues to be an active mentor of new OT graduates, as well as OT students.