Second Daughter loves to cut...anything and everything. The worst time of this phase constituted weeks of finding cut items all over the house nearly every day: curtains, sheets, clothes, carpets. You can imagine my frustration. Finally, I indulged her desire to wield those scissors by giving her the grocery advertisement every week. Our living room was full of tiny cans of soup, boxes of macaroni and cheese, and cuts of meat, but almost everything else in the house was safe from her wandering scissors.
While at a conference earlier this year, I discovered Melissa and Doug's Cut-Crease-Create booklets. Here was an opportunity for Second Daughter to combine her love of cutting paper with some folding (perhaps leading to origami for handicrafts) and practice envisioning and executing three-dimensional work (perhaps supporting her math skills).
I'm just making excuses. I knew she would love them and I wanted to buy them for her. So I did and assigned one page each week for school. She's been completing two or three. I allowed the extra pages, as long as she understood there were three books for the year and when they were gone, they were gone. Even at a few a week, the books should last her most of the school year.
There are three different books available and I bought a copy of each one: Cut-Crease-Create - Snowflakes, Cut-Crease-Create - Pink, Cut-Crease-Create - Blue. Each book has twenty "sculptures," all in vibrant colors. Second Daughter is seven and has been able to make nearly all of the creations without any help.
She chose the Blue book first. I didn't save all of her work, especially the ones that were more three-dimensional like the finger puppets, but in addition to the dinosaur and octopus on the cover, there were a volcano, a bat, a snake, and strings of things like palm trees, robots, cars, and buildings. There was even an upright and a little football you could make.
She just recently started the Pink book. The projects include butterflies, birds, hearts, a circle of ballerinas, flowers, a rainbow, a castle, a fan, and a crown.
The Snowflake book contains 20 snowflakes, most made with other shapes (frogs, butterflies, hearts, flowers, fish, crabs, leaves, penguins, mushrooms, stars, and others). Just from looking at the projects (there are sheets on the backs of the books showing all of them if you find the books in-person), I think the snowflake one is the most intricate and probably the most difficult overall.
The Amazon links above are affiliate links. I receive a small commission if you click the link, add something (anything) to your cart, and make a purchase in whatever time frame Amazon currently assigns. I appreciate every little bit. Personally, I bought these from Rainbow Resource Center and the current price there is cheaper than at Amazon. It looks like Melissa and Doug is selling them even more cheaply. I don't receive anything if you purchase these or anything else at Rainbow Resource Center or Melissa and Doug.
