Computers, Typing, and Keyboarding for Students

Computer – Typing – Keyboarding

Skills for Homeschoolers

One of the most valuable skills I learned in my entire public school career was typing. I don’t know where I’d be today if I hadn’t learned to type. As a homeschool mom it was something that occurred to me that these days is just about as important as learning to read and write.

It doesn’t matter if your child wants to be a writer or even be anywhere in the business field, just say they want to maybe have a blog, website, email a friend or something as simple as that. Typing for home educated children should be a top priority, as much as using the computer. Homeschoolers are, generally by nature, entrepreneurs and learning how to properly type is a valuable skill for any entrepreneur, in any field.

 

I had been teaching typing to my oldest daughter using various programs – mainly free downloaded software. A couple of the programs work really well, and she learned a lot from them, but I wanted something with a little more substance, as they are more for doing drills.  I really wanted a good typing book, or worksheets and I found two that could be used for a homeschool.

 

The first was Dr. Fry’s Keyboarding for Beginners, from Teacher Created Resources, that I found on Amazon. We went through it and found it to be a fairly good book with a nice format, and being the only one we could find, I figured we were stuck with it.

 

One thing that I found a little irritating was that for frequently misspelled words, they call them “spelling demons”, so that was a little off-putting.  And it’s keyboarding for beginners – that’s where it ends, but I think it was a decent program to start with, but not my first choice.

 

Then I found this program, Christian Keyboarding for the Christian School.  I am really excited about this one – not only is it written from a Christian perspective, but it also covers things like letters, envelopes, drills, timing, reports, centering, proofreading marks & a lot more.  This one can be used as a stand-alone typing program for higher grade students (6 and up), nothing complicated to install, and now they even have an elementary version – in large or small print.  The version below is the paperback version from Amazon.

 

To save a dollar on the eBook formats, print out as you need, get some free sample lessons, and to see the elementary version –  Click here to view more details.

Personally, I’ve always felt that as soon as your child starts using the computer proficiently that they should be learning to type properly so that no bad typing habits are formed.  So I have preferred to teach most of the kids at the elementary level, but not every child is ready at that stage.  Also, then it’s like reading and writing, (if they’re ready for it), you can get it out of the way and therefore it becomes easier to move on to other computer learning.