Last week I was writing a blog post early in the morning when my three year old came out of her room. She saw what I was doing and wanted to help. Since she can recognize all of the letters of the alphabet I let her type a few letters of each sentence. That little process reminded me of how fast I type even though my technique isn’t perfect. All that to say, practicing typing whether through writing or playing a game does make you a quicker typist. For kids, playing a game is a more fun way to develop typing skills than writing blog posts or email. Here’s a handful of games for kids to play to develop their typing skills.
Before it was acquired by IXL ABCya produced a lot of games designed to help elementary school students sharpen their skills in a lot of areas. Those games are still available. Included in ABCya’s catalog of games is a fun typing game called Cup Stacking. In this game students have to type the letters that they see on the cups that appear on their screens. When they type the correct letters the cups stack up into a pyramid. Once the pyramid is built students have to type the letters again to deconstruct the pyramid. The object of the game is to build up and take down the pyramids as quickly as possible.
Typing Rocket is another typing game developed by ABCya. Typing Rocket is a sixty second game in which students make fireworks explode by typing the letters that appear on the rockets in the games. In the sixty second span of the game students try to correctly type as many letters as they possibly can. The rockets speed up as the game progresses.
Typing Club is a free typing instruction site that offers some unique features for students and teachers. One of those features is a story-based typing practice activities. In those activities, demonstrated here, students unlock stories as they type. Unlocking the next part of the story provides and incentive for students to type accurately and quickly. That’s not the only way to develop and practice typing skills in Typing Club, but it is the most engaging way to practice.
TypeTastic is a service that offers free typing games. The games start with basic skills like identifying the letters on a keyboard and build up to touch typing skills. TypeTastic has its games divided into three sections. The first section called “Let’s Build a Keyboard” features games for the youngest students who are just learning to recognize letters on a keyboard. The second and third sections called “Hop Onto the Keys” and “Keyboarding Kickstart” feature progressively more difficult games intended to help students develop their touch typing accuracy and speed. Each game within each section contains multiple levels for students to work through. Each game could take students an hour or more to completely master.
Create Your Own Online Typing Practice Activities!
Flippity offers a free Google Sheets template for designing your own online typing activities for your students to play. To do this you simply make a copy of the template provided by Flippity then fill in the words and or phrases you want to have appear in your activities. Flippity hosts the activity and provides unique URLs for your activities to share with your students. In this video I provide a demonstration of how the template works. (Please note that the beginning of the video references a Google Sheets add-on that is no longer available. Instead, simply get the template here on Flippity.net).
