Typing is one of the most essential skills in modern life. In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need in order to give your child a head start at becoming an expert typist.
Children Need to Learn Typing at an Early Age
We strongly believe that children should be introduced to important skills at an early age, and touch typing certainly counts. One of the unfortunate trends I’ve observed in recent years is that young people aren’t developing typing skills to the same extent as previous generations. This seems to largely be a result of changes in the types of computing devices children and teenagers have grown up using. More and more, kids are being handed smart phones and tablets at a young age, and hardly ever interact with a standard computer keyboard.
This is unfortunate, because there are many professional and personal tasks that simply aren’t well suited for touch screen devices. A particularly notable example is programming, which is one of the primary topics we’ll be covering in later grade levels of our computing curriculum. There’s no getting around the fact that learning to code will involve a substantial amount of typing. As with any other skill, the earlier you introduce it to your child, the more adept they can become. For this reason, we suggest that kindergarten should include a significant amount of typing practice.
Jungle Junior
There are numerous online resources for teaching typing; however, most of them are designed for students who are at least a grade level or two beyond kindergarten. One notable exception is Jungle Junior, which is specifically designed for grade levels PK-1. We recommend that you use this as your primary resource for typing instruction and practice.
Using Jungle Junior
There are a total of 250 lessons in Jungle Junior. We suggest that you aim to do an average of roughly 4-5 lessons per school day (although you should certainly feel free to do more lessons on some days and fewer / no lessons on others). At this pace, it will take roughly 11 weeks to go through all the lessons. Each lesson only takes roughly 1-3 minutes to complete, so this shouldn’t take very much of your day.
You don’t need to create an account if you don’t want to
The Jungle Junior website encourages you to create a free account and log in, so that it can save your child’s progress. Feel free to do this if you would like, but be aware that it really isn’t necessary to create an account; you can go through all the lessons without one. You can always open any lesson (including lessons that you haven’t “unlocked” yet) by clicking on it. You might receive a prompt asking you to confirm that you want to skip to a locked lesson, but you can just click the “Continue” button to bypass the lock.
This means that it’s always possible to start back where you stopped, even if you didn’t create an account to save your child’s progress.
Be Flexible With Typing Rules
Typing teachers tend to be very stringent about exactly which finger should be used to strike each particular key. They demand that students keep each finger firmly positioned on the so-called “home row” keys at all times, except when that finger is being used to strike one of its assigned keys. The strong impression these teachers give is that there is only one proper way to type, and that any deviation is unacceptable. The Jungle Junior website is no exception, and it will tell your child exactly which finger should be used for each key.
In reality, the traditional typing technique that is aggressively pushed by typing teachers is probably not the best way to type. The fastest typists in the world don’t strictly follow the traditional typing method. Some research suggests that typists using self-taught strategies do just as well as typists who have been formally trained in the home row method. Perhaps most importantly, there are good reasons to doubt that the home row method is the most ergonomically sensible approach.
The terrible ergonomics of the traditional system
The following image shows which finger is assigned to each key within the traditional typing system (each color corresponds to a different finger).
The above finger assignments are quite unfortunate, given that they are highly asymmetric with respect to the left and right hands. For example, consider the assignments on the bottom row. When the typist needs to strike one of the keys on the bottom right (specifically, the “n”, “m”, “.”, “,”, or “/” keys), they can simply curl the corresponding finger inwards toward their arm – this is an easy and comfortable motion. Meanwhile, when the typist needs to strike one of the keys on the bottom left (specifically, the “z”, “x”, “c”, “v”, or “b” keys), it is necessary to perform a far more awkward movement. The traditional system makes about as much sense as wearing right shoes on both feet.
For this reason, we suggest instead using the symmetric typing system. This is similar to the traditional typing approach you will learn from any standard typing class, but with a few reassignments to follow the natural movement of each hand. Whenever you are teaching your child which finger to use for each key, we recommend that you refer to the following image (note that in this system, the “b” key can be pressed by either pointer finger). For more information, please see The Symmetric Typing Project.
The Only Real Typing Rule
Although we believe the symmetric typing system is a good fit for most students, it’s possible that your child may prefer to make slightly different associations between fingers and keys. That’s okay – everyone has slightly different hands, and a system that works great for one person might not be ideal for another. Don’t worry about dogmatically enforcing one system or another.
There’s really only one typing rule that is completely absolute: your student must never look at the keyboard while typing. As long as they can type quickly and accurately without looking down, the nuances of typing style are largely irrelevant.
Keep Teaching Mouse Skills
As we’ve mentioned in our guide to preschool computing, it is essential for young children to develop mouse skills at an early age. This should continue in kindergarten.
Putt-Putt and Freddi Fish
In our preschool computing guide, we recommended the Putt-Putt and Freddi Fish games as being a superb tool for helping children develop mouse skills. This remains true in kindergarten, and we recommend that your child should play an additional 2-3 games from the Putt-Putt and Freddi Fish series. The main games in these series are:
- Freddi Fish and the Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds
- Freddi Fish 2: The Case of the Haunted Schoolhouse
- Freddi Fish 3: The Case of the Stolen Conch Shell
- Freddi Fish 4: The Case of the Hogfish Rustlers of Briny Gulch
- Freddi Fish 5: The Case of the Creature of Coral Cove
- Putt-Putt Joins the Parade
- Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon
- Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo
- Putt-Putt Travels Through Time
- Putt-Putt Enters the Race
- Putt-Putt Joins the Circus
They are currently available on Steam for $6.99 each. If your child has already played a few of these games, just pick 2-3 new ones from the list. If you feel that your child would benefit from something slightly more advanced, you may also wish to consider games from the Spy Fox and Pajama Sam series (also available on Steam). For information about using Steam in your homeschool, please see our parent’s guide to using Steam.
You should anticipate playing through each of the games you select multiple times. It’s very likely that you’ll need to help your child play through these games the first time or two, to show them how to solve the various puzzles. Even when helping, try to avoid taking control of the mouse. Explain what your child should do, but let them do the clicking. After a couple of playthroughs with your guidance, your child should be able to mostly play the game themselves, with relatively little assistance.
Hidden Through Time
We also recommend the game Hidden Through Time for kindergarten. This is a “hidden object game”, in which players are tasked with finding and clicking on certain objects that are scattered throughout an elaborate scene. Many items do something when they are clicked (for example, fires light up, bushes rustle, and doors open), and children will have fun exploring each scene for ways they can interact. The game’s simplicity and emphasis on straightforward clicking makes this a great choice for kindergarten.
One of the things we really like about this game is that it includes a scene editor, which allows players to create their own hidden object puzzles, filled with characters, buildings, and objects that they place themselves. This is a fantastic outlet for creativity, and also happens to be surprisingly flexible. For example, players can define specific paths for characters to follow, essentially programming their behavior. This makes it possible to create not only pictures, but also simple little movie scenes. Kindergarteners won’t necessarily be able to fully utilize all of the scene editor’s features, but that’s okay – this is a game they can return to in future years. We always appreciate a game that can grow with a child, and this one fits the bill nicely.
Hidden Through Time is currently available for $7.99 on Steam. It includes heavily fictionalized scenes from four different time periods (Stone Age, Ancient Egypt, Middle Ages, and Western), and several additional time periods are available for purchase as separate DLC. There is a sequel (Hidden Through Time 2); however, the sequel is a more challenging game, and is probably better suited for slightly older players.
Goals
To complete this grade level, students should:
- Complete all 250 lessons in Jungle Junior.
- Play 2-3 games in the Freddi Fish and/or Putt-Putt series. Your child should be able to largely play through these games on their own; this might require that you assist them during the first handful of playthroughs.
- Play through at least the first five levels of Hidden Through Time, and explore the scene editor.
