Below are a variety of free keyboarding resources, including some lesson plans, fun activities for all ages and more. Some of these resources may be useful as is, but they can also be inspiration for you to create your own fun activity to help teach keyboarding to your students.
A Clue for Keyboarding
This activity helps students identify and locate the keys on the keyboard through memory. This involves using index cards as flashcards and reinforcing the memory of a keyboard when not looking at one directly.
https://teachers.net/lessons/posts/1656.html
Body Keyboard
After you have gone over the keyboard layout and position of each letter with the students, assign each student to a letter, and even one to be the cursor. Then tell the students what word you want to type and those students move to the front of the room to spell that word, including the cursor. You can say “use backspace” and the cursor moves and the letter returns to their position. There are many ways to utilize this “body keyboard” idea.
https://teachers.net/lessons/posts/2494.html
Pen Pals
For grades 5-8, after some keyboarding experience has been developed, you may want to try this activity, as it also involves internet research, creative writing, spelling and grammar. Each student will create an imaginary pen pal that they will write letters to back and forth. Start out small, with basic details such as age and location, but when writing as the pen pal, they should be writing as if they know details about where they live, so internet research is likely required.
https://teachers.net/lessons/posts/4037.html
A Fun Alternative Way to Teach Young Children The Keyboard
For K-2 students, these are a couple fun keyboarding lessons to get them familiar with the placement of letters on the keyboard. It involves creating a large keyboard to lay on the floor and introducing each letter and the finger that presses it. Then have the students “type” words by hopping on the letters on the floor.
http://www.nailitnow.com.au/lessonplans/childrenprint.html
Utah Curriculum Resources from the Utah Education Network
This list of resources are geared more towards older students with enough typing experience to be typing in their own responses in Word. They provide PDF files of the necessary instructions, worksheets, etc. There are speed and accuracy drills, technique resources and much more.
https://www.uen.org/lessonplan/resource/core/1214
Keyboarding Stuff by Tonya Skinner
Tonya Skinner is a certified technology teacher and these lesson plans are geared towards “business education”, so they may be best for older students. But there are free assignments, activities, exams, and much more to browse through.
http://lessonplans.btskinner.com/keybrd.html
Do you have a fun or unique lesson plan or activity you use to teach your students keyboarding? Share it with us! Let us know on Facebook or LinkedIn, or send us an email and we’ll share it ourselves, we’d love to hear from you!
