Cutting Activities for Preschoolers: Make Friendship Bracelets With Straws! - The Inspired Treehouse (2024)

February 21, 2022 By Lauren Drobnjak

Looking for ways to make cutting activities for preschoolers fun and interesting? Try making your own DIY friendship bracelets using straws!

If you’re looking for fun cutting activities for preschoolers – and a super cool way to help kids get to know each other better and make friends – this is the activity for you!

Lately, we’ve noticed that many of our preschoolers are struggling with scissor skills during our therapy sessions and play groups at The Treehouse. There are several different issues that can come up for kids as they’re learning to cut with scissors. It’s a challenge for fine motor skills, visual motor skills, hand strength, and more!

We love using simple crafts and art projects to give kids extra cutting practice.

We use these fine motor activities to help kids:

-Learn how to keep their thumb up on their cutting hand and on their stabilizing hand.

-Learn how to cut on straight lines

-Practice the hand-eye coordination needed to cut toward a target

-Practice cutting out shapes

–Strengthen the hand muscles for other functional fine motor activities

This fun preschool cutting practice activity is perfectclassrooms or therapy groups! Here’s how it’s done…

What You’ll Need:

5 different colored straws

Scissors

Pipe cleaners

Friendship bracelet template (freebie below)

What to Do:

Give each child a pair of scissors.

Pass out a straw to each child so that there is a variety of the 5 colors around the table.

Have kids start snipping the straws into small pieces (about ½” in length). Kids love this activity because as the child snips their straw, the small pieces bounce everywhere! Let them go crazy, snipping away and watching their straws bounce all over the room!

Once they have snipped their entire straw, have kids get down from the table and collect any straw pieces that have bounced onto the floor, placing them all in a pile on the table.

Place 5 small bowls on the table and have kids sort the straws by color into the bowls.

Pass out pipe cleaners to each child.

Pick up one of the bowls and read the first question on the printable to the first child. When they answer, give them a bead of the first color and have them string it onto their pipe cleaner. Go around the table, asking the same question to each child and having them string on the first color.

Repeat with the next color, moving on to the next color on the printable. Continue until you’ve used all of your colors. Then, help kids fasten their pipe cleaners to create bracelets.

Send kids home with their bracelet and one of the printable cards that shows the questions that kids answered as they added each bead to their bracelet.

How to Change it Up:

-Add a handwriting component to this activity by having kids write their answers to each question on the writing printable page.

-Cutting straws is a great activity to add to a cutting tray or sensory bin for extra practice with cutting skills.

-Another fun way to play with straws is to have kids snip them into pieces and then press the pieces into playdough. Kids can pretend that they are birthday candles on a birthday cake!

Looking for other activities like this?

Try this hole punch fine motor activity.

Check out our vehicle scissor skill activity using tape.

Place a line of stickers on a piece of paper and have kids practice cutting down the line.

Check out our getting to know you activity pack to help kids get to know more about their friends! Perfect for therapy room or classroom use!

Have kids practice snipping and cutting strips of paper or junk mail for extra practice.