A Bit About Me

Sunday, December 9, 2012

Keyboards for Kindergarten

This week, I'm really looking forward to seeing my kindergarten classes. For the last couple of months, (seeing each class for only one 30-minute period a week) we've been working on the various mouse functions:
1.  Click
2.  Double-click
3.  Click and drag (a.k.a "click-drap-drop")

They've completed activities like drawing pictures of plants on Paint software, clicking and dragging letters to match the capital with the lowercase in order to create a rainbow, and using Audacity recording software to record a line of their group's poem.

Now, they get to "play games". In order to get these young students to become more efficient with identifying written letters and using the keyboard, I happened to have tripped upon this game that requires students to find and press letters on the keyboard in a timed setting. On ABCya's Typing Rocket Game, students have to press the letter key that corresponds to the letter that they see on the rocket ship on the screen. Every time they get one right, the rocket (which looks more like a firework) explodes.

It's pretty entertaining, and disguising this keyboard familiarity building activity as a game makes it such an easy sell to any class.

The next step will be to incorporate Keyboarding Zoo, a more elaborate activity that requires the students to press one letter of the alphabet multiple times before moving on to the next ordinal letter.

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