Cutting practice worksheets

Every cut on these sheets is a thick dashed line with a small pair of scissors drawn where it starts, and no two cuts come closer than an inch anywhere on a page, so the strip of paper between them stays wide enough for a small hand to hold while the other hand works the scissors. The lines all start at the left of the page, so a child cuts in from the edge of the paper to reach the scissors, and every page prints in gray with no frame, under a title, one line saying what to cut and a Name and Date line.

The nine pages follow the order children usually learn to cut in. Six short straight lines come first, the shortest an inch long and each half an inch longer than the last, every one stopping at a small picture; then six long lines right across the page. Zigzags with gentle points come next, then waves, then round curves that swing half a circle one way and half a circle back, then lines with square corners, where the paper has to be turned at every corner. The spiral is one long cut from the outside in, three laps an inch apart, and the last two pages are shapes to cut out: a circle, a square and a triangle, then a star and a heart.

The first set is all nine pages in one PDF. The other three are the parts that take longest to learn, for a child who needs more of one kind before moving on: the zigzags and square corners on two pages, the waves, round curves and spiral on three, and the five shapes on two. Each shape is between two and a half and three and a half inches across, and the star and the heart are the same plump star and heart as on the shape tracing page, so a child who has traced them has seen them before.

The maker above prints any one of the nine pages alone, or any of the four groups, as one PDF to print as many times as needed. Cut lines come in one size and one style, so the tracing settings for line size, dots, fading and arrows are hidden while Cutting practice is chosen; a title of your own can still go at the top of every page.