12 Paper Tearing Activities: Simple Ideas to Build Fine Motor Skills

Tearing paper is an excellent workout for little fingers, vital for developing fine motor skills in early childhood.

Here are some fun and easy paper tearing activity ideas that require little to no preparation.

Though it may start with your toddler gleefully tearing through toilet rolls and pages from books, tearing paper is a skill that should be encouraged.

Children should practise tearing right through preschool and beyond. Tearing paper requires significant coordination, as children learn to grip the paper and pull in opposite directions.

Tearing as an activity is beneficial in many ways:

• Tearing strengthens finger and hand muscles.
• It develops fine motor control, essential for learning to write.
• It improves eye-hand coordination.
• Ripping paper is a sensory experience.
• It helps the left and right sides of the hands to work together, promoting bilateral integration.

All kids need in order to learn how to tear properly is lots of opportunities to practise.

There’s no need for fancy paper tearing projects. It’s equally important to let children freely explore tearing without a structured model.

Remember, the learning is in the process, not the outcome.

All you need for these activities is coloured paper and other kinds of collage materials, some liquid glue or a glue stick, and possibly a pair of scissors.

Adapt these paper tearing and pasting activities for your kindergarteners, preschoolers or toddlers.

1. Free Collage

Before attempting any adult-led ideas, let children tear paper freely. Provide small pieces of different coloured paper, glue and a large sheet of paper to stick them to.

Let children experiment independently and create their own designs.

Collaging is one of the best fine motor activities.

2. Colour Patterns

Show your children how to follow a simple pattern (and introduce an early maths concept at the same time) by making a simple 2-colour pattern of torn strips of paper.

Start by tearing an A4 sheet in half (or quarters for younger children) and demonstrate how to control the paper to tear strips.

3. Texture Collage

For this tear-and-paste activity, make a texture collage with different materials and types of paper. 

Teach kids to tear the materials into small pieces and then arrange them any way they like onto the paper. 

Offer a small tub of different papers and materials for children to choose from.

Here are some different types:

• Tinfoil
• Regular computer paper
• Tissue paper
• Newspaper
• Cardboard
• Magazine paper
• Baking paper
• Sticky paper (tape or stickers)
• Wrapping paper

4. Tissue Paper Fun

This fun paper-tearing activity for toddlers is found in the book “The Toddler’s Busy Book”, written by Trish Kuffner.

Use a piece of tin foil as the base of the picture. Drop some baby oil onto the foil and get your children to spread it with a paintbrush.

Provide tissue paper in various colours and invite kids to tear pieces and see what happens to them when they land on the oil. They stick but can easily be moved or removed. 

Make a fun, oily paper collage.

5. Garden Scene

Ask children to draw the branches of a big tree standing in a garden. Create the garden scene by tearing small pieces of coloured paper to make leaves, grass, clouds or any other elements in the garden scene.

Paste the leaves onto the branches of the tree and then fill in the rest of the scene.

This activity requires concentration and serves as a valuable fine motor exercise.

6. Snow Picture

As a variation to the activity above, make a picture of a snowman and get kids to tear snowflakes out of white paper or tissue paper and paste them falling from the clouds.

7. Pass the Parcel

Ripping off wrapping paper is one of the most fun ways to practise tearing. In the classic party game pass the parcel, a parcel is passed around the circle and when the music stops, the person who is holding the parcel may remove one layer of wrapping paper.

Play this in a classroom or at home by passing the parcel back and forth with your child. Play a game of ‘guess which one of your toys I wrapped in the paper’ to encourage tearing off the layers.

P.S. Gift bags might be the new trend but they take all the joy out of tearing open a present. Why not wrap your child’s gifts this year and add on an extra layer of paper just for fun?

8. Tearing Tape

Sticky tape or masking tape is a favourite with toddlers.

Simply give children a roll of tape (or several coloured rolls) and let them have fun, either sticking pieces of tape to a paper or allowing them the freedom to tape your walls, furniture, etc.

9. Leaf Tearing

Collect fallen leaves from the garden or park and tear them into tiny little pieces.

These can be used to make an autumn/fall collage.

Younger toddlers will love carrying around a small box with their leaf tearings. Search for flowers and other natural items at the same time.

10. Home-Made Gift Paper

Your family will love receiving gifts wrapped in homemade wrapping paper. 

The best thing to use to make the collaged paper is actually wrapping paper, as it comes in fun colours and decorations. Paste torn pieces of decorative wrapping paper onto a base sheet (black or any solid colour works well).

Teach your children to paste the pieces of paper carefully, ensuring there are no ‘ears’ sticking up. 

11. Paper Crumpling

While these are all ideas for learning to tear, there are also many benefits of doing paper crumpling activities.

Start with a simple activity such as tearing off big pieces of paper, crumpling them into a ball and aiming them into a laundry basket or other target. 

Later, try crumpling the paper with just one hand at a time. This is tougher than it sounds!

12. Paper Bag Faces

Another fun activity from “The Toddler’s Busy Book”, this idea also involves using crumpling as a technique.

Tear up old magazines or newspapers and crumple the pieces into balls. Then, stuff them inside a brown paper bag until it is full.

Close the bag at the end with a rubber band and draw or paint a face on the front side.

I hope you’ll enjoy trying these tearing activities with your kids at home or in class.

Here are more pasting activities and some simple, process-oriented art activity ideas for preschoolers.