Help your students practise their fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination with these kindergarten cutting worksheets!
Learning how to cut is such an important fine motor skill! It can be challenging for kindergarten students, whose hands are growing and changing so much in these early years. To be ready for school and all the writing, drawing, and cutting required, it's essential that all students have plenty of opportunities to move and manipulate things in increasingly complex ways.
These printable worksheets are a great way to help them practise their cutting skills every day! Even better, they feel more like play than work, and your students will have fun using these scissors worksheets to practise their skills.
Fun Printable Kindergarten Cutting Worksheets
Scissor Skills Worksheets
These printable scissor skills worksheets include 20 printable templates to help your students cut different types of lines, including:
- straight lines
- dotted lines
- wavy lines
- zig zag lines
- simple shapes
- complex shapes
- shrinking shapes
You can see these cutting worksheets in action here:
These printable worksheets are a fun way to practice cutting without making it feel too rote!
Young children love cutting these practice pages, and they'll want to see what they can create with the cut-out shapes! My favourite section is the shrinking shapes at the end. These get tighter and tighter, really working those scissors skills!
Get your printable cutting worksheets here.
Cut and Paste Worksheets
These free printable colour sorts are great practice for cutting out rectangles and using glue sticks to glue them into specific locations.
Get the free printable worksheets here.
Letter & Number Cutting
These cutting worksheets can be used to consolidate early letter and number recognition, as well as cutting skills. Students can cut out and decorate letters of the alphabet or numbers.
Cut and Paste Number Jellyfish
With this free download, students cut the jellyfish tentacles and match the numbers 1-10.
Students could also then add dot stickers or draw dots for each number.
Fine Motor Puzzles
These fine motor puzzles come in both colour or black & white. Students must cut out the four pieces of the puzzle, then re-assemble and paste on the puzzle boards. There are different puzzle shapes to cut out - rectangles and triangles.
There are two different sets to choose from - food pairs or everyday item pairs.
Rhyme Cut & Paste
With this free rhyme printable, students must cut out the pictures and match to the rhyming words - great for working on cutting practice at the same time as phonological awareness!
Uppercase Lowercase Letters Cut & Paste
With this free PDF resource, students must cut out the lowercase letters and match to the uppercase letters.
Kindergarten Fine Motor Skill Development
Cutting is such an essential fine motor skills activity, and it is more complex than it looks.
It's all based on how students use and perceive the muscles and tendons in both hands. When you break down the small skills that go into holding and using scissors, you can quickly understand why this essential skill requires practice!
Plus, to be ready for kindergarten, students need to have some basic skills ready. These are standard expectations for kindergarten students here in Australia.
By the time a child is 4-5 years old, they should be able to:
- Write their name
- Cut a line continuously
- Copy a cross and a square
- Write the numbers 1-5
By ages 5-6, they are expected to have the following skills:
- Cut simple shapes
- Cut and glue accurately
- Hold their pencil properly
- Colour in the lines
- Draw basic pictures
- Copy triangles
As you can imagine, students will use these skills repeatedly in school!
It takes intentional practice to build fine motor control and strength, so it's best to teach it from the beginning of the school year. With a little daily practice, your students will have much greater control over their fine motor functions and have an easier time with their instructional activities.
Ready to incorporate fine motor activities into your daily routine? Get my free Fine Motor Development Handbook to learn the ins and outs of this critical skill and activities to make it easy!
What skills do kids need to use scissors?
To cut items, students need to know how to hold, open, and close the scissors with one hand while holding another item still. This sort of bilateral coordination is incredibly challenging at this age!
They must also have sufficient hand strength and dexterity to open, close, and glide the scissors in different ways.
Young students also need visual motor skills to track the movements of the paper and the scissors at the same time. For kindergarten students, these are challenging fine motor tasks and it takes time and practice to do them smoothly.
How to implement cutting practice worksheets
The best way to incorporate these printable cutting practice worksheets is to use them for morning work. They won't take away instructional time, and your students can warm their hand muscles up for the day.
Implement morning bins: If you add in some of the activities below, you can use these to make fine motor morning bins! Each day, your students can get some good cutting practice or work on other essential fine motor skills. This is the easiest and most seamless set-up and is a hands-on, engaging way to sneak in extra practice each day.
Start with basic lines: The easiest lines to cut are straight lines, so start there. My printable cutting sheets were created based on how children's motor skills develop, and they become incrementally more challenging over time. Over time, your students will be able to cut zig-zag lines, curvy lines, and even different shapes. Start with set 1 and keep working until your students can do all 20 pages easily.
More Fine Motor Skills Worksheets & Activities for Kids
These interactive worksheets and activities will help your students target different fine motor skills, including eye-hand coordination, finger strength, and visual attention. Some are free worksheets, while others are hands-on activities anyone can make with paper or some household supplies!
Toilet Roll Hair Cuts
Using scissors, trim vertical lines into a toilet paper roll to create a hairdo. Remember to draw a smiley face! Kids always love this activity, and it's a great way to practice cutting straight or curved lines for the hair.
Scissor Salad
Have students sketch out fruits and veggies on paper, then cut them out with scissors for a delicious scissor salad. Add them to a bowl and have them use tongs to "serve" the salad for an extra challenge!
To make it easier, print out fruits for them to cut instead of having them draw.
Water Droplets
This is such a fun activity! Dilute food colouring in water and have students use pipettes to place drops in different places on the task cards. This activity works those fine motor skills, and kids love using the pipettes!
Get the water droplets printable pages here.
Pom Pom Ice Cream
Print out these ice cream templates and set out a tray of pom poms with tweezers. Encourage your students to use only the tweezers to fill the ice cream with colourful pom poms! Since the tweezers are so small, they require strong fine motor strength.
Get the PDF file here
Popsicle Sticks
Students arrange coloured popsicle sticks in different patterns to match the designs on the task card. This activity will require your students to practise a variety of different grips and turn a two-dimensional drawing into a three-dimensional creation.
Get your printable PDFs here.
Dot or Drop Letter Sheets
Students can use water droplets or a marker to fill in the dots along these letter outlines. This task will practice those fine motor skills and letter identification at the same time!
Get your printable educational activities here.
Alphabet and Number Mats
Use playdoh to mould letters and numbers. This is a great way to strengthen those little hands and practise forming letters and numbers!
Get your practice sheets here.
Looking for more?
These cutting practice activities and fine motor activities are just the start! Get the free Fine Motor Handbook for 50 pages of practical information and tips.
If you're ready to dive in deep with these fine motor skills, get the entire bundle of fine motor activities and save!