Seeking Imperfection

I have to say that I was greatly amused last week when I saw that this week's Unplugged Project was in my honor! I have joked about having the theme be "scissors" a couple of times, and this week, guess what the theme was? Scissors!

Paige loves to use her scissors. They are safety scissors - I think they were made by Crayola, but don't quote me on that. She often tells me she's going to go get her scissors to cut something. She likes to help cut tags off her new clothes, things like that. She's always ready to go get the scissors. In fact, not too long ago I made a "cutting box" and put a bunch of different colored and textured paper in a box for her to cut.

I wasn't too sure where to go with this theme - seeing as it was my idea and I'm a perfectionist, that could have been a recipe for disaster as I could have spent hours searching for the perfect toddler scissor project. But I worked really hard to control myself. I did look around online a little for toddler/preschool cutting projects though, and got a couple of ideas. I hadn't thought of giving her something other than paper to cut. Someplace online suggested giving kids straws and play dough. First I tried the straws. The ones we had here are clear, and I think it might have been more fun to cut up different colored straws. I learned that when you cut a straw, the little piece that you cut off goes flying across the room. That was interesting.

Then I got her to try using her scissors with her play dough, or "squish" as she calls it. At first she told me no, scissors aren't for play dough. But then she got around to giving it a try.







She seemed to have fun with this - cutting a snake of squish into little pieces, and then putting them in the play dough container and we pretending she'd made soup. :)

We tried one other thing this week. I found cutting pages at Wondertime Magazine. There are a whole list of printables, including a bunch of ones geared for young cutters. For example, one set of printables was a farm. It had a barn and animals to be cut out. I liked that they had two sets of lines, depending on the age and experience of the child doing the cutting. It had a dotted line for younger kids, and a solid line for older kids. The solid line was more difficult cutting than the dotted one. So I printed the animals out and Paige cut them out. They even have little stands to cut out to make the animals stand up. We did that together too. That was fun.

I'm happy that Paige got to use her scissors, and I managed not to go all crazy and perfectionisty trying to find a "perfect" project for a theme inspired by us. :)

Come join us with this week's project - the theme is birds!