Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Working with Scissors

One of Matthew's IEP goals at preschool is:

Matthew will increase his visual motor integration skills as demonstrated by holding spring open scissors and paper with both wrists in neutral position, following set-up and cut on a 4" long x 1/4" thick straight, curvy, and zig zag line staying within 1/2" of the line for 75% of data days.

Accuracy is not important to me at this stage although it would be an indicator of any improvement in his hand strength and visual-motor coordination -- two factors that we view as important to be able to do more precise fine motor tasks.

We have two pairs of spring-loaded kid-friendly scissors at home - brands: Fiskars and Maped. We got both pairs from amazon.com then I saw a pair of the Maped brand scissors at the local Dollar Tree store. Other adaptive scissors are available from stores like TheraPro (search for scissors on their site), Beyond Play, and other specialty/ therapy stores. Matthew currently uses the spring-loaded scissors because he still has a hard time using a scissors manually (without the spring). Other kids at his developmental stage may or may not have the same issue. Everyone's different.


Just last quarter, he needed hand over hand help with using a pair of spring-loaded scissors. His hand strength has increased since then. He didn't want my help the other day.



He's not a pro yet with scissors but he's determined and keeps working hard at it. For him, success with it (with anything) is a confidence booster and becomes a self-motivator to do more.

3 comments:

Anna said...

Im going to look at our Dollar tree. Would love to get my hands on these without having to order them. impatient I suppose. Thank you for the reminder. We really need to get working on this.

Rochelle said...

I saw these type of scissors at our Walmart just the other day too.

Noah's Dad said...

Another great post! I'll have to bookmark this for when Baby Noah gets a little older. :)