These are excellent resources to help a child advance through the developmental sequence of scissor use. Cutting with scissors involves the skill of hand separation, fine motor coordination, bilateral coordination, and eye-hand coordination. Hand separation, a skill that is also required for handwriting, is when the thumb, index, and middle fingers separate from the rest of the hands.
Scissor skills develop sequentially. Before a child is able to cut with scissors he or she must be taught the proper positioning of scissors and body during cutting tasks. The progression includes: snipping, cutting straight lines, cutting curved lines, cutting simple shapes (circle, square), and finally cutting complex shapes.