Justin & Rach Start Typing

You know, I’m wanting my children to eventually post articles here, and perhaps … set up their own site to start journaling a bit, – perhaps even picking up a computer language like Python or Perl to do some simple scripting. But, guess what all those things require to be efficient? Yep, typing! I’ve thought about teaching them to type several months ago … but just never got around to it. Well, Saturday, as a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing, I decided to start teaching Rachael … and she loved it!

We started out by challenging her to find two keys on the keyboard that were similar – which, of course, were the “F” and “J” home keys. Next, we lined her fingers up in the home position. Then we worked on getting her to learn the letters associated with her left hand. I was quite surprised that she loved doing it. We worked on very simple exercises like:


aaa aaa aaa
sss sss sss
ddd ddd ddd
asd asd asd
dad dad dad
fad fad fad
lad lad lad
fad; fad; fad;

I had her type these keystroke patters to complete a full line in the editor -roughly 100 characters. After thirty minutes, Justin, saw what was going on and wanted to type as well. I started over and did the same with him. Same exercises, basically. Seems Justin was a bit more coordinated that I thought … he did very well, perhaps all those computer games has his fingers trained better than I thought. Furthermore, I had received the following two confirmation statements that the kids enjoyed learning:

Justin said:

Hey, Dad, can we print this out and let me save it? Mom may want to see this.

After supper, we were watching a movie, and Rachael said:

Hey, Dad, can we go into the computer room and let you give me some more typing lessons?

So, the kids may be typing sooner than I thought they would.