House of Burke: Spider Web Cutting Activity

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Happy Fine Motor Fridays! One of the important skills that we have been practicing a lot in homeschool preschool is using scissors. This spider web cutting activity was the perfect Halloween themed set up to help K practice his cutting while letting him also use his imagination. Looking for some tips and tricks or more simple cutting practice setups? Check out our post on Introducing Scissor to Toddlers! (Note: This post works for introducing scissors to older children too!)

To setup our spider web, I used one of these amazing plastic spider web bowls (I love these for educational AND decoration purposes!!) I took a ball of orange yarn and cut strips a little longer than the length of the bowl. Then I stretched them across and tied them off on each end. I placed a large toy spider in the center of the web. I handed K a pair of Pre-School Training Scissors (we love these, and I would absolutely recommend them as a first scissor!), and told him that the object was to get the spider to fall into the bowl.

Building fine motor skills with your little ones is incredibly important. Cutting is one of the most important fine motor skills of all! Activities like this one, mask the intent of building a skill with a fun challenge. Kingston was so excited to make the spider fall that he went to town snipping away. I could see him continuously correct himself to ensure that the red part of the scissors was pointing up. Having an objective helped him to put his frustrations aside and keep trying when the yarn was difficult to cut.

After quite a bit of snipping, he got the spider to fall down into the bowl. At this point, your little one may be done with the activity, or like Kingston did, they may want to turn it into a pretend play activity. K moved the large spider around the web, made it talk, and even gathered some smaller plastic spiders from around the room to be the spider's babies! This activity was certainly worth the five minutes it took to tie all of the strings on. When he was finished, we worked at snipping the rest of the yarn pieces off, and then filled our spider web bowl with spooky objects to display in our homeschool room!