Typing for Children

The ability to touch type, now also called keyboarding, is an incredible useful skill for anyone who uses a computer. This is especially important for children who are just beginning a lifetime of computing.

If you use a computer, you use the keyboard all the time, even for mundane things like entering Web addresses. The better your keyboarding is, you can perform many computer tasks faster and that matters.

1. When your child knows how to type, he or she doesn't think about where to put their fingers. The fingers have, in a way, "memorized" the keyboard. (Ever drive home on 'automatic pilot'? It's like that.) When your little typist doesn't have to concentrate on the keyboard, he or she gets to think about their work. They are actually composing as the thoughts come.
2. The student's work is legible.
3. Learning to keyboard properly at an early age will minimize bad habits that are hard to "unlearn". Bad habits lead not only to sloppy typing but physical conditions like neck aches and repetitive stress injuries.
4. Efficient typing skills also improve communication. If you child types well, they can type more and be more expressive and more accurate when you need to communicate quickly such as with messaging and group collaboration.
5. Students with learning difficulties including dyslexia or dysgraphia find it easier to type than write because the letters automatically go from left to right and they don't need to worry about writing them backwards.

So, when is a good time to start your child typing? Many technology educators feel that about the third grade is an ideal time to start. By now, many 8 and 9-year-olds have enough fine motor coordination to use all the fingers to hit the keys and to strike keys without looking at them. Also, by this time, children generally have developed enough language skills where keyboarding (and thus writing faster) will feel useful to them.

You can start younger children with typing. However, with children 7 and younger, you don't want to teach touch typing as much as introduce the child to the key positions and using both hands.

If your child is not ready, there's no reason to push it, especially if you child does not have to use the keyboard much. Wait until they are ready.

The typing goals for a child naturally will be different than for an adult. A good target speed for your child to work for is one that is faster than they can write. If your child writes at about 10 wpm (words per minute), which is typical of 3rd graders, a typing goal would be 11 wpm typing. By the time the students reach eighth grade, 30 words per minute with 85 percent accuracy is good goal to reach.

When learning to type, whether adult or child, there are two key things need to happen.

The first is memorizing the keyboard. Almost any software or Web page that teaches keyboarding will instruct and drill on using the correct fingers on the keys assigned to them. Any learning program that your child uses should instruct at a pace that is slow enough for his or her age or patience. With time and practice, memorization will come, which brings us to the other requirement.

The second thing is that the student must have time on the keyboard to practice. Most teachers know that repetitive skills like this are best learned in short lessons practiced over time. In other, words, typing for 10 minutes for 4 days a week is much more effective than 2 sessions for 30 minutes.

One other thing that helps improve typing is having something 'real' to type. If you child has to actually type a paper for school or create a flyer for Scouts, the lesson becomes that much more relevant. Practical typing assignments will help cement this skill.

There are plenty of software and Web sites, free and for a price, that teach typing specifically to children. Play with the program yourself before sitting your child in front of it (you can get a demo copy of most typing software before you pay for it).

If your child is taught the basics of keyboarding, their speed will develop as they keyboard their way through life.