Typing to Learn

 

I've been researching typing skills curriculum for young children for an after-school ctc.

I found some excellent lesson plans where the emphasis is on integrating typing into learning, early literacy skills.    "Pre-keyboarding" lessons will often use an alpha smarts, emphasize good posture, and is integrated with learning abcs or letter recognition.    The teaching aids or props are lots of fun too!   You can use character gloves where each finger of the glove is a character puppet.   Each finger puppet has a job or is assigned to a letter in a row.  I grabbed Harry and Sara's finger puppets, but this random bunch of characters makes for a too complicated storyline.  One example had a family - the clicker family.   I have some fabric markers, now I need to find some gloves ....

As the students learn a letter name and sound, they learn the correct finger to use to type it.   As the child becomes more confident, you can call out a finger puppet name and gauge how well the students did by their responses to the question, “What letter did you get?” or ”What word begins with that letter?”  Later on you can give a series of  fingers and ask, “What is the mystery word?"

I hunted and gathered some choice links my delicious account.