I’ve seen Geetle type a few times. She uses one finger and spends approximately 30 seconds looking for each letter. She might be a little faster now. I haven’t seen her type in a couple months.
Last night, Pookie had a homework assignment where he was supposed to bring in his favorite recipe to school. I’m assuming that the teacher is just looking for new recipes for home since I doubt that they will be making anything in the classroom.
BeAGoodMom decides that Pookie should go down to the computer and type the directions to his favorite food and decides that I should be the one to go with him.
In a not very proud moment, I doubted his ability to do the project and my ability to help him without doing it all myself. But we marched down to the computer room with our directions.
I opened Notepad and typed “How to make” and then asked Pookie what his favorite food is. Spaghetti he said. So I added “spaghetti.”
I went to the next line and typed “1)”
“Okay. How do you make spaghetti? What is the first step?”
“Put spaghetti on plate,” he replies.
I reach for the keyboard but then decide that this is his homework not mine and there is an ever so slim chance this will work (again, I’m not proud of my internal dialogue – I’ve been having some rough days at work or maybe need more melanin or something).
He starts wiggling his head over the keyboard staring at the letters and type “p” wiggles some more and types “u” and then proceeds to type the following recipe:
How to Make Spaghetti:
1) put the spaghetti on plat
2) add soce
3) adspriclcheese
4) adbuter
5) eatitup
6) wah yourhands
It took us about 5 minutes total. I typed the numbers, he typed the rest after he and I talked about each step along the way. He even sometimes makes mistakes on purpose so that he can make the funny sound some computer game makes when he types incorrectly and then hit the backspace key.
Then he said, “Never doubt me again, Dad.”
He didn’t actually say that but he would have had every right to. I’ll get a hold of this parenting stuff someday. I have some good kids teaching me.
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What a great post! I thought I was the only one “letting” my Kindergartener use the computer – Little E can navigate his way around just about anything (he has his own computer) but he has a terrible time typing because he has to hunt down the letters. He constantly asks us to “come spell me something” despite the fact that spelling isn’t the problem. I’ve considered trying to find a typing tutorial for kids, but I haven’t done it yet. They grow up so fast – it’s hard to let them be big kids sometimes, isn’t it?
Good for Pookie. I remember typing on a computer when I was around his age. Granted, I think it was an IBM computer that took those giant floppy disks, but hey, the experience is the same.
Don’t feel bad about having feelings of doubt, I’m not a parent, but I sometimes have those feelings about kids I teach. (“They can’t do this, this is going to be a huge ordeal, this is going to take all day.”) And they usually surprise me by not only doing whatever I ask, but surpassing my expectations. I guess the lesson is that we should not underestimate kids.
Heather,
I remember being an older kid (probably 4th-5th grade when we got our first computer) and working through some of those typing tutor programs. I loved them and am a pretty quick typer today because of it. I should probably look into one of those for the kids, too.
You young kids. When I was his age, I was learning to type by copying my Little Golden Books using a typewriter. We would have killed for giant floppy disks.
It is frustrating to have those moments of doubt but I’m working on just ignoring them. Those thoughts should be my problem, not my kids’.
Typing this has made me miss our old computer….how I love keyboards that make noise, and all those educational games that we used to have. I think that was the only way I ever liked math, was on one of those math computer games.
Well, I am really old fashioned because I just bought a electric typewriter for the kids to play on.