Yes, kindergarten children can learn to type their own stories using their knowledge of letter sounds and words. This is great experience for them to express their ideas on paper without handwriting confusions interfering.Typing facts about farm animal that we learned from our Internet research, is just one of the ways we are preparing to share our new information. The main question the children are challenged to answer is, "Why do farmers have these animals on their farms?" We are moving away from the common responses of, because they are cute or the farmer likes animals. The children enjoy using the child-friendly format on the Early Learning Toolkit four screen to type their facts. The children began this project by listing farm animals, choosing one they would like to learn more about, then reading non-fiction books, conferring with classmates, and finally looking them up on the online World Book encyclopedia.
Now all this knowledge is being recorded in sentence form including spaces, capital letters at the beginning of sentences, and ending with periods. The children are able to select the font, its size and the color they want to use. As they type, they have their notes for forming their ideas into sentences, as well as the Word Family Posters and Word Wall to look at for spelling high frequency words.
Although we have been capitalizing our names and using the space bar for some time, typing our own sentences is great way to share our information and to practice using the keyboard.
We will conclude our study with the children selecting to make one of three choices to highlight their animals. They may chosen to make a puppet, create a collage scene, or construct a mobile. Our research projects will be shared with Ms Deegan's second grade class, Ms Hawley's first grade class, and our parents in the next few weeks.
