Kids in the 21st century: Typing for 7-11-year olds
Raising children in the era of screens puts any parent into a difficult position: we know – and say – that they should not exceed one hour a day, but – to be honest – it’s sometimes not feasible. Just consider 2020-2021 lockdown periods when parents had to keep on working to maintain their jobs with their kids going crazy around them. So like it or not, kids spend a lot of time in front of screens. Parents’ task, therefore, is not only to try and reduce the overtime, but also to engage kids in useful (I’d say educative) activities. ELT-Tutor’s first suggestion is: teach typing to your kids.
Why typing?
That cursive handwriting is not really sustainable, has been pretty clear to many of us. Books and web materials are written in printed letters, hardly anybody writes love letters by hand any more, smartphones, touch screens and keyboards took over the territory of pens and pencils. Don’t misunderstand the message: cursive handwriting is great (I still make a first hand-written draft of nearly everything I transfer then onto the computer), but it will be more like some archaic wisdom: fascinating if you know it, not needed for everyday tasks.
However, even keyboards are getting out-dated: we are very likely to have voice-controlled devices soon, automated typing devices, so we will only need to dictate what we want the machine to type up for us (it already exists for blind people). Yet, real changes in the real world are way slower than technical advances, so we can be nearly sure that our kids will need to be able to type: they’ll text, they’ll post on social media, they’ll write a blog, an essay for a school competition and hopefully, their thesis.
When to start?
Children need to be familiar with the alphabet, which means that they are ready to dive in at the age of 7, approximately, in the second year of their elementary school. After recognising letters easily, they can start with typing. Typing is part of the computing curriculum in the UK (Key Stage 2 = KS2).
PS: Soon we might have schools which teach writing straight away on a keyboard.
How to start?
ELT-Tutor suggests DANCE MAT TYPING on the BBC Bitesize webpage. It’s a 4-level learning program for KS2. At each level, kids are guided through 3 stages. Letters and special characters are gradually introduced through entertaining and interactive animations.
Level 1:
At Level 1/Stage 1, a rock-‘n-roll sheep teaches the basics of typing: the home row (asdg jkl;), the SPACE key, finally ‘g’ and ‘h’. In Stage 2, an Italo-Anglo Octopus leads the way and after some revision adds ‘e’ and ‘i’. In Stage 3, a Rooster from a ranch takes the kids on a tour to see how ‘r’, ‘c’ and ‘u’ are typed:



It takes about 30 minutes to work through each stage and children can repeat the stages any time they want/need to.
What to remember?
The most important thing is to teach kids how to sit and how to hold their hands. The height of the table might need to be adjusted and kids need to learn to relax their shoulders: these are on the way from the brain to the fingers and rigid shoulders slow the communication down between the two extremities. Finally, kids need to encouraged to sit straight, so breathing can flow freely while typing.
All this is explained at the bottom of the BBC webpage.
Finally, you also need to consider the type of keyboard you use. On an Italian keyboard, for example, the semi-colon is not right to ‘l’, that is the key of ‘ò’. By changing the language to British keyboard in the settings, you can get the same characters on the screen.

Extra practice:
After finishing the three stages of the first level, you might want your child to practise more. Here are three simple Scratch animations with extra practice:
LEVEL 1 STAGE 1
LEVEL 1 STAGE 2
LEVEL 1 STAGE 3
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You might also like to read articles about how use Scratch in English teaching: CLICK HERE
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