Teaching Children to Use the Computer Keyboard
By Don McCabe

Once children start learning to read and write, they often cast their eyes on the computer. They want to use the keyboard. There's something almost magic about the way letters pop up on the screen. And that bit of magic can help children not only learn the computer keyboard, but, if they're experiencing a bit of difficulty learning to read and write, learning the keyboard may just be that key to unlocking the door to complete literacy.

Teachers often ask me, "How young can I start my children on learning the keyboard?"

Like most of my answers, it starts, "It all depends." I hate to keep saying that, but there are so many factors involved. One is the size of their hands and whether or not they can gently rest four fingers of each hand on the home row keys. If their hands are big enough, if they're big enough to sit at a computer, and if they really want to learn, they're old enough.

When I'm asked to recommend a keyboarding program, I simply ask the teachers, "Do your children have any problem at all reading or spelling?" If the answer is, "No," then almost any commercial program will do the trick.

The reason is that there isn't that much difference between any of the programs. They all teach in the first lesson the seven letters and the semi-colon that constitute that home row. And from there on in, it's a race to finish learning all the letters in as few lessons as possible.

But if the answer is, "Yes, my children do have reading and spelling problems," then commercial typing or keyboarding programs may be very frustrating to them. Good readers have built-in responses to spelling patterns, so they can easily read and spell non-words like: depotion, piction, incordation, and cligging. Good typists are good readers who quickly build upon these built-in responses to develop new patterns.

Poor readers don't know the patterns and don't know the words so they must type letter-by-letter, stroke-by-stroke. Poor readers need training in spelling patterns to become good typists.

What then can teachers do for their children who have reading/spelling problems? Well, they can create their own typing texts that help with reading and spelling very simply.

Here is one ordering of the teaching of the keyboard by lessons:

Lesson 1 a, d, l, and space bar. Lesson 2: s and ; Lesson 3: f, t. Lesson 4 r, j. Lesson 5 c, k. Lesson 6 i. Lesson 7, h. Lesson 8 e. Lessons 9 through 14, shifting, commas, question marks, apostrophes, quotation marks while the patterns available are drill in. Lessons 15 to 28 will have the letters in this order: g, m, n, b, o, p, u, w, y, v, q, x, z.

Another ordering that works well and can be used for the teaching of handwriting as well is: abcd rst y efgh w ingklm opqu vxz. One letter per lesson or unit and using only the letters available to teach words that have the same patterns.

Making their own keyboarding program can be very rewarding for teachers as well as saving them the cost of purchasing such a program.

Don McCabe is the research director of the AVKO Educational Research Foundation, a non-profit organization that maintains two Web sites that have all kinds of free information for teachers: www.avko.org and www.spelling.org.