Scissors designed for use by children are often made of plastic, which makes it harder for children to cut themselves. The blades are significantly duller than the blades on adult scissors. Child scissors made of metal are shorter and easier for little hands to handle, with blades that have blunted tips and aren't very sharp. Still, teach your child to hold the scissors closed around the blades while he's transporting them.
Language courses such as Rosetta Stone equate images with language for faster and more comprehensive learning. Your children can learn the alphabet the same way. Give them magazines and child safety scissors and let them enjoy learning the alphabet and associating letters with words and pictures. Use a large sheet of poster board or construction paper to draw all 26 letters. Let the child find pictures and words that start with each letter. Older children can use the activity to spell words or their name to strengthen their scores on spelling tests.
Your child could be the future of the art world or the gaming and design industry. Keep used magazines and newspapers around. Name four things for your child to find in the pages. The child should use the safety scissors to cut out pictures of those items, then paste the pictures in a row. Next to the pictures, your child re-creates the drawing with a set of crayons or colored markers.
Your child's personality starts to form early on. New York Center for the Arts Education study that shows crafts "provide students with the unique opportunities to work collaboratively, to develop creative and critical thinking skills, to solve problems and develop innovative solutions."
Encourage your children's individuality. Let them express themselves. Give them books, magazines, and newspapers and tell them to create a mural by finding all their favorite things. They can post their favorite things to a poster board, which can be framed and hung on the wall in their room.
Greeting cards are a time-honored tradition in kindergarten and Head Start school programs. Give the child construction paper, child-safe scissors, non-toxic glue, and a box of crayons so he can tell everyone in the family how he feels. You can help him spell more difficult words, or let him copy the words from other sources you provide. He can also use glitter, cut ribbon, or cut out pictures to decorate his cards any way he pleases. He will begin to recognize words and letters more readily.