Terrific Typing

Writing In Different Styles - Lesson 1

Objectives

Begin to use two hands for typing
To understand and use good posture when when typing
To understand and use Caps Lock and Shift appropriately for typing capital letters.

Lesson Resources

Lesson Slides

Writing In Different Styles

Lesson 1 - Terrific Typing

Lesson 2 - Read All About It

Lesson 3 - Kapow! Comic Strips

Lesson 4 - A Blank Canvas

Lesson 5 & 6 - Publish It, Check It

Introduction

Explain that over the next few weeks we are going to be improving our digital writing skills. What’s going to be our most important piece of equipment? The keyboard! If we’re going to be good writers it’s going to be important to improve our keyboard skills too, so that’s where we are going to start.

Part of accurate typing is being comfortable and sitting well at your computer, has anyone got any tips?

Sit up straight to avoid hurting your back (no slouching and keep your feet on the floor)
Don’t sit with your eyes too close to the screen (around 50 cm away is about right)
Take a short break every 10 minutes to rest your eyes and body
Try not to rest your wrists on anything when you type

Typing Games

Have a look at the posture tips and typing introduction videos.

How should you sit at your computer?

Why should you take occasional breaks?

Highlight the fact that while it might feel difficult to begin with, it's important that they try to get used to using two hands to type as, with some practise, it will make them a much faster typer . Our hands should be positioned above the ‘home row’ (the row beginning with a) and we should try and use all our fingers to reach the different parts of the keyboard.

2Type colour codes the keys on the keyboard and the fingers that you should use for each colour.

There are lots of different typing challenges within 2Type, and you may want to assign different tasks to different children, depending on their typing abilities.

For most children, go into the First Steps section and the Home, Top and Bottom Row Keys.

Ask them to work through the sections from top to bottom, focusing on using two hands and all their fingers and thumbs. Keep the timer for each activity down to 1 or 2 minutes maximum.

The first two options on each section are static letters to find as fast as you can.

Point out that the keyboard diagram at the bottom highlights the key to press each time with a circle, so if they can't find it quickly on their own, they can glance down to that for help.

In the third option for each section, the letters fall from the top of the screen and you must type them before they hit the floor to avoid them filling up the screen, a bit like the classic game Tetris.

In this version you have the option to set the speed at the beginning. We'd recommend setting it on slow to start with.

Using the shift key

When should we use capital letters in our writing? How do we create a capital letter using a computer keyboard? Discuss that Caps lock can be used if you are writing a whole sentence or more in capital letters as that turns all letters into capitals, but point out that holding the shift key also make letters into capitals (while you are holding it) and that this is a more efficient method. They should practice holding it with their little fingers (depending on which side is easiest) and using their other fingers to type the letter key they need.

Ask the children to try out the shift key challenges in the Shift Key and Space Bar section.

It can be difficult to identify whether some letters are shown in lower or upper case, as there's not a lot of difference between them, and without other letters around them, it can be tricky to tell. So again, remind the children to use the keyboard diagram at the bottom of the screen, which highlights when the shift key should be used for capital letters.

Longer challenges

Finally, ask them to have a go at some of the the Moving on challenges, which involve typing words, phrases or full paragraphs against the clock as accurately as possible. Encourage them to use two hands, all their fingers and to use the shift to create the capital letters. Take note of their accuracy score and words per minute (WPM) score.