We Finally Got A Real Keyboarding Curriculum And I Can’t Believe How Much Changed
I’ve been teaching 4th grade at Lincoln Elementary for 12 years, and for 11 of those years, keyboarding was an afterthought. We had that free, ad-ridden website that the district linked on the old technology page, the one where kids had to sit through a 30-second ad for fruit snack cakes before they could start their 10 minutes of “practice.” I’d assign it once a week on Friday afternoons, when everyone was checked out anyway, and most of the time kids would just hold down the space bar to rack up the minutes required, or play the hidden little car game buried in the settings instead of typing. I didn’t even bother checking, honestly. What was I gonna do? I had 28 kids to get through their fractions unit and their book reports, keyboarding was low on the list.
Last spring the district voted to adopt this new standards-aligned curriculum, started rolling it out K-5 with a proper scope and sequence: kindergarten just gets used to where keys are, 1st grade learns home row hand position, 2nd grade starts building consistent speed, 3rd and 4th focus on accuracy with common high-frequency words. I was skeptical, honestly. Just another new initiative to add to my already overflowing plate, I thought. The first week I forgot to order the home row sticker packs the curriculum suggested, so I had to scribble little Gs and Hs on scraps of index card and tape them to the kids’ keyboards. Half the tape fell off by lunch that first day. It was a mess.
I went to the day-long PD for it over the summer, and that’s when I realized I’ve been typing wrong my whole life. I use my left index finger for both F and G, my right index for H and J, never learned to use my pinkies for shift or control. The 2nd grade teacher sitting next to me pointed it out when I was typing up my PD notes, and I got all embarrassed, like I was a kid getting called out for chewing gum in class. So when school started, I practiced the proper form along with the kids for the first two weeks. My pinkies were sore for three straight days. Who gets sore pinkies from typing? Me, apparently.
It only took about a month for me to notice the difference. During writing workshop, before, kids would raise their hand every two minutes asking “where is the v?” or “how do you get a question mark?” I’d spend half my workshop time circulating just pointing at keys for kids who still hunted and pecked every letter. Now I actually get to sit down and talk to kids about their story plots, or help them untangle their run-on sentences, instead of being a walking keyboard chart.
Javi, who’s in my class this year, had me for 3rd grade two years ago. Back then, he begged me every single writing assignment to let him turn it in by hand. His handwriting is so messy even I can barely read half of it, and I kept telling him that starting in 5th grade all the state tests are online, so he has to practice typing. He’d turn in half-finished work every time, say his hand got tired, or he forgot what he was writing by the time he got all the words down. Last week he turned in a four-page story about his iguana, Mango, who escaped from his tank and ate his little sister’s Barbie. Four pages. Single spaced. I stared at it for a full minute after I pulled it up on my laptop. I don’t think he’s ever written more than a page total before, in any assignment.
It’s not all great, don’t get me wrong. I still have three boys who figured out how to make the typing practice game generate random gibberish so they can rack up WPM without actually typing correctly, and last week I caught them doing the lesson with their elbows just to see who could get the highest speed. And the kids who didn’t get this early instruction, the older kids who’re still stuck with the old “just figure it out” method? They get embarrassed. Last week a 5th grade girl came to me after school because she’s getting pulled for extra practice, and she said “all the 2nd graders are faster than me, it’s stupid.” That breaks my heart. We’re playing catch-up for them, and it’s not fair that they got left behind with the old system.
Also, the district cut the elementary art teacher’s supplies budget by 30% to pay for this keyboarding curriculum. I’m still annoyed about that. Just because typing is important doesn’t mean kids don’t need to paint and draw too, you know? It’s a trade-off that doesn’t feel good, no matter how nice the new curriculum is.
But even with all that, the difference in how much kids are putting out on the page is impossible to miss. I always heard people talk about how writer’s block is this big thing for little kids, but I’m starting to think half the time it’s not that they don’t have ideas. It’s that getting the words out of their head and onto the screen is so much slow, frustrating work that by the time they’ve hunted and pecked three words, they forgot what the next sentence was gonna be. Now their ideas just flow right out, before they lose them.
I don’t know. It’s just one of those small, boring things, you know? No one ever writes thinkpieces about elementary keyboarding curriculums, it’s just a basic skill no one thinks about. But when you see a kid who never wanted to write anything suddenly turn in four pages about his escaped iguana, it makes you realize that all those small, boring basics actually matter. This isn’t some magic fix for all the problems we have at our school. We still don’t have enough desks, we still have too many kids per class, we still don’t have enough art supplies, or enough recess aides, or enough of a hundred other things. But it’s something. It’s a nice change, for once.
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