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Fun
Keyboarding for the Reluctant Typist
Adapted from notes prepared by Visiting Teacher Denise Probert
in 1993.
Some students seem to just hate the repetitive nature of learning
touch typing in the traditional way – from a keyboarding manual or a
typing tape. In order to motivate such students Denise developed a number
of activities which may prove useful. They activities offer a mental challenge
or involve memory or imagination. Students may also benefit from discussion
about and during the typing task. It may also help if the students try to
moderate their fixation with making mistakes, so lots of encouragement is
needed and possibly even your disregard of their mistakes!
Practice Activities
-
List the AFL teams with their colours and mascots beside
them eg:
Essendon - Red and Black - Bombers
-
List the name of six friends, their hair/eye colour (may
need some help with this) and their football team eg:
Melissa Mitrevska - black/brown - Geelong
-
List all your favourite basketball players with their team
names
-
Type the list of Top 10 (or 20, 30, or 40) pop songs from
the charts with artists tabbed in a second column
-
List the contents of your bedroom
-
List all the streets near your house
-
List all the suburbs you that you can remember
-
List all the railway stations that you can remember
-
List the days of the week, then months of the year
-
See how many words you can make up and type from these starter
words:
computer, table, sunshine, waiting, thunder, transport, agreeable etc
-
See how many four letter words you can make which begin
with: h, b, t, g etc
-
Free association typing: the Visiting Teacher calls out
a starter word eg lunch, happy, pet, today etc which the student types.Then
the student responds with a free association word which he/she types eg
food, sad, dog, now etc. The Visiting Teacher then replies with a word to
be typed eg eggs, dog, cat, often, and continues this back and forth.
-
Turn typing (good for the very reluctant typist, who also
benefits from observing and modelling correct typing habits from the Visiting
Teacher) – the Visiting Teacher types an initial sentence and the
student makes up and types the next one of the story. Sometimes this is
enough to get a creative student to keep on typing for half an hour or so.
However for a very reluctant typist you will probably need to keep on taking
turns in typing sentences in the story. For example:
-
As Donna walked home from school she saw that behind
the hills an ominous brown cloud was forming …
-
Ferdy was one of the happiest frogs in his pond …
-
When Karen first started at her new school she didn’t
know what to expect of her new classmates …
-
Typing letters (brainstorm an issue relevant to the student)
– for example:
-
Pretend your favourite TV show has been taken off the
air. Write a letter of complaint to TV Week asking for it to be put
back on.
-
Imagine you are on a two week school camp. Type a letter
home to tell friends or family what you have been doing.
-
Speed and repeated typing – using a medium length
sentence that the student can remember, see how many times they can type
the sentence in a minute or in 5 minutes. Students find that they can type
increasingly more words within the time span as they get more practice.
It is very rewarding! Sentence examples:
-
On the weekend I played with my dog.
-
Most people like ice-cream and sweets.
-
You can watch basketball on television.
-
If you observe a student making repeated errors on a particular
letter, use a well-known tongue twister or invent your own to practice that
letter eg:
-
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
-
She sells seashells by the seashore.
-
Whispering winds waved wearily away.
-
Creative Stories / Fractured Fairy Tales – for the
imaginative student with a sense of humour, well known fairy tales can be
modernised, humourised or turned into a news item! eg The Three Little Pigs,
Cinderella, Goldilocks etc:
-
Last night police mounted a search for pretty young
woman who left behind one of her dancing shoes on the steps of a city
nightclub………
-
Two brother pigs are recovering from their fright after
being left homeless by a wolf blowing their homes down……..
-
Descriptive Typing – an idea that may encourage your
student to observe objects or people more closely:
-
using the stimulus of items in the room (eg a poster
showing stationery items) or a picture brought by the Visiting Teacher,
have the student type describing the features of that picture or object.
-
type a description of a favourite sports or popstar.
-
Rhymes and Songs – this activity may help the student
to develop a rhythm to typing:
The student can type nursery rhymes already known by heart, or other poems
brought in by the visiting teacher which can be sight typed or recited/dictated
to them.
-
The student can type favourite pop songs (from memory) or
bring in lyrics to retype.