Typing curriculum by grade

Speed and accuracy goals for each grade, a school year of touch typing lessons, and how to judge progress fairly.

A third grader taking Texas's state reading test types an essay as part of it. Explaining why children that young can answer on a computer, the Texas Education Agency points to the state's technology standards, which expect students to type proficiently by grade 3, touch keyboarding included, and notes that at least 20 other states have elementary students write extended responses online. This page sets out goals for each grade, a year of lessons on CamelKeys, one session minute by minute, and how to judge progress fairly.

Why a plan by grade

The Common Core writing standards bring keyboarding in at grade 3, where students publish their writing using keyboarding skills with help from adults. From grade 4 they set a length: “a minimum of one page in a single sitting”, then two pages in grade 5 and three in grade 6. Grades 7 and 8 drop the line, and no grade is given a speed. Nor do the standards define a page or a sitting, which leaves both to the school.

Few schools give typing a class of its own. In EdWeek's 2024 survey of 404 school and district leaders, about 69% said keyboarding was taught in some form, so roughly three in ten did not, and only 8% taught it as a separate class (another 11% did both). Grades 3 to 5 were the most common place for it (84%), ahead of K–2 (62%) and high school (57%).

Leaving it to chance has a cost. In a UK study of about 300 primary pupils who had not been taught to touch type, handwriting was faster than typing at every age, and their typed compositions were weaker than their handwritten ones. The authors concluded that children need explicit touch-typing instruction before the keyboard can help their writing. When typing lives inside other subjects, a plan by grade is what stops each year's teacher assuming the last one taught it.

Goals for each grade

These are end-of-year goals for a one-minute test of common words, with five characters counted as a word. Accuracy on CamelKeys is the share of key presses that were right, and a mistake fixed with Backspace still counts against it, so it is stricter than a count of errors left in the text. The keys assume the class started in grade 3.

Lesson tasks always need at least 94% accuracy, since that is what passes a lesson. The accuracy goals above are for timed tests.

Where the numbers come from

Most published goals rest on one rule of thumb, five words per minute for each grade, which Wisconsin's Department of Public Instruction states in so many words. So the agreement on 15, 20 and 25 below is less independent than it looks.

The differences are in the details. District 30 starts five words higher. Wauwatosa counts errors rather than a percentage: a minute at 15 WPM is about 75 characters, so three single-key errors would be 96% on CamelKeys's count. Utah once asked for 15 WPM in grade 3 on 30-second timings, but its current standards drop the speed target. Accuracy goals run from 80% to 100%. Part of the reason for the spread is that no standard keyboarding assessment exists for children, which makes norms hard to set.

How we chose ours

Speed. We use five a grade for grades 3 to 5 because it is the most widely published and it fits the page counts. Count a page as 250 words of five characters: at the grade 4 goal of 20 WPM, one page is about 13 minutes of keying, two pages at 25 WPM take 20 minutes, and three at 30 WPM take 25, each leaving time in a lesson to think. At 15 WPM, grade 6's three pages would take 50 minutes. Grades 6 to 8 get the grade 6 figure, 30 WPM, so the goal suits a late starter too. High school gets 40, where the rule leaves grade 8: a floor, not a ceiling.

Accuracy. We hold 90% from grade 3 to grade 8, the strict end of the published range because CamelKeys counts corrected mistakes, and keep it flat on purpose while speed rises: a faster student should not become a sloppier one. High school rises to 95%, the top of one programme's range for grades 6 to 12. Kindergarten to grade 2 gets 85%, the top of the 70% to 85% that programmes suggest for those ages. With no speed asked of them, care is the whole job.

Timing. Judge grade 3 against its goal in May, not October; a class still learning the top row in the autumn will be nowhere near 15 WPM. As a check on realism, a National Business Education Association table, reproduced by Nebraska's Department of Education in 2011, links 15 to 18 hours of instruction with 10 to 15 WPM, and 30 to 35 hours with 25 to 30 WPM.

A school year of lessons on CamelKeys

This plan uses the 26 touch typing lessons for a class starting in grade 3 or 4: 36 weeks of three sessions a week, 15 minutes each in grade 3 and 20 in grade 4. That makes 27 or 36 hours, against the 25 hours or more of instruction and practice that CanChild says most children need to learn to touch type. Short and frequent beats long and rare: Arlington ISD's guidelines prefer four 20-minute sessions a week to two of 45. Schools that teach keyboarding as a block, as Nebraska's model scope and sequence does with 20 to 40 days a year in grades 3 to 6, can run the same units faster.

Each lesson has its own pass speed, from 8 WPM for lesson 1 to 26 WPM for the review in lesson 16, which is more than any grade 3 or 4 goal above. So set each lesson as a class task with your own target speed. It replaces the lesson's, and a student who passes the task has passed the lesson, still at 94% accuracy or more. The last column gives the speeds we suggest, never more than a lesson's own; a class starting in grade 5 can use the grade 4 speeds. In a school class's task form, pick the grade under Grade goals and these speeds, or the test goals above, are filled in for you.

Lessons 23 to 25 teach keys such as the tilde and the backslash, which a nine-year-old rarely types, so grade 3 can leave them for grade 4. Each week runs the same way: session one brings in the new keys, session two repeats the lesson to reach the target, and session three revisits an older lesson and ends with a game. One run of a lesson is 25 practice words, two to three minutes at 10 WPM, so a session holds about three runs.

Hold timed tests of ordinary words until lesson 16 is done, then give one every other week from week 22. Before that, the words contain keys the class has not learned, so a test measures hunting, not touch typing; until then the lesson tasks, which keep each student's best speed and accuracy, are the record. Games are different, since nothing is graded. From week 9, a round of Sandstorm, whose first rounds are short words falling slowly, makes a good end to the week.

Starting in grades 6 to 8

Older beginners can take a new lesson each session: at three sessions of 20 to 30 minutes a week, the 26 lessons take about nine weeks. Keep the lessons' own targets, which suit a goal of 30 WPM. Students who already hunt and peck quickly usually feel slower at first, so tell them before they start. Afterwards, keep a one-minute test every week or two, use the daily challenge as a warm-up, and move the practice into real work. High school starters can follow the same route, with the lessons as homework.

Kindergarten to grade 2

Opinions differ on when formal touch typing should start. A 2005 review of keyboarding research put it in the upper elementary grades; CanChild thinks grade 2 or 3 is probably fine, and admits the research says little either way. The usual reasons for waiting are small hands, fine motor control that is still developing and, for the youngest, letters that are still being learned. A small study shows what is possible: eighteen first graders taught for 35 minutes a day over nine days could all type words and short sentences without looking by the end, though their speed barely changed. CanChild also notes that early keyboard use does not seem to stop children learning to touch type later. So keep it short and playful:

• Five to ten minutes, a few times a week. One run of lesson 1 is about 110 characters, under three minutes at 8 WPM.
• Kindergarten: finding letters, starting with their own name, and the space bar, Enter and Backspace.
• Grades 1 and 2: the home row, lessons 1 to 4, and lesson 5 by the end of grade 2 for children who are ready. As tasks, give them a low speed target of about 5 WPM, one programme's suggestion for grade 1, so that care decides the result.
• Games, not tests: Sandstorm for fun, and no timed tests.

One session, minute by minute

A 15-minute session from the middle of a grade 3 year, in a week with a new lesson. For 20 minutes, add a third practice run.

Stand behind the row, where you can see hands and screens together, and correct one thing per child per session. A student who passes early should repeat the lesson for a better score rather than race ahead: a lesson passed at 99% is a lesson learned. For chairs, desks and screens, see the typing posture guide.

Setting it up on CamelKeys

1. Create a school class. School classes are free, with up to 200 students in each.
2. Add students with picture sign-in. Type their names, one per line. Each gets an account with no email address and two pictures in place of a password, and signs in with the class code, their name and those pictures. Print the login cards and keep them by the computers. Older students can join with their own accounts instead, using the class code or the invite link.
3. Share the class to Google Classroom from the class page.
4. Set tasks. A task is a timed typing test (15, 30 or 60 seconds, 5 minutes, or a set number of words) or one of the lessons, with a target speed, a target accuracy and a due date. On a lesson, your speed replaces the lesson's own and accuracy never goes below 94%. On a test, either target can be left empty, so a test with only an accuracy target can be passed by any careful typist, however slow.
5. Read the grades. The class page shows every student against every task, with a tick and the best speed for each pass. For any student you can print a report for parents covering the last 30 days: days of practice, time spent typing, tests, best speed, the change in speed once there are six tests or more, accuracy, lessons passed and how each task went.
6. Download the results as a CSV file: one row for each result since the student joined, with its kind, speed, accuracy, length and date.

In a school class nothing is public: profiles, names on leaderboards and share links stay private, and students see no adverts. Our student privacy commitments set out what we keep and how a school deletes it, and the for teachers page covers the rest.

Judging progress fairly

Accuracy before speed

Speed on CamelKeys counts only the words typed correctly, and accuracy counts every wrong key, fixed or not, so a student who rushes sees both numbers fall. Check accuracy first and praise it first. We would rather see 12 WPM at 96% than 18 WPM at 82%.

The same test each time

The goals are for one-minute tests; a 15-second result swings too much on a single slip. Utah's standards use 30-second timings in grades 3 and 4 and one-minute timings in grade 5, and 30 seconds is a fair start for a grade 3 class. Take three tests and record the middle one. Watch technique as well as numbers: Utah's grade 5 check asks only whether the student types without looking, a good question in any grade.

Each student against their own record

The goals are a destination, not a ranking. Children start in different places and grow at different rates, so the fair comparison is with the same child a month ago. Sort the CSV file by student and date, and let the report's change in speed be the number that goes home.

When progress stalls

When a student's speed has not moved for a few weeks, work through these in order:

1. Accuracy. If it has slipped below the goal, the student is rushing. Ask for a slow run with no mistakes, then build up again.
2. Technique. Watch them type. Eyes on the keys, one finger doing another's job, or hands drifting off the home row will all hold speed down.
3. Particular keys. After a test, the results page shows the slowest keys and letter pairs and builds a short practice drill from them.
4. Variety. Swap a week of tests for the camel race, where three pacer camels run just below, at and just above the student's recent speed, or for the daily challenge. Then give it time: in the NBEA figures, speed roughly doubles between 15 and 30 hours of instruction.

Students who need a different path

Children with motor coordination difficulties, such as developmental coordination disorder (DCD), can learn to type by touch but usually need longer. CanChild says children with DCD may need more than the 25 hours most children need, and that the typing taught in a school computer lab is often not enough for them; the 2005 review found that students with handwriting problems may need goals and strategies of their own. For a student who will type instead of writing by hand, the useful benchmark is their own handwriting. Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland counts students as functional keyboarders once their typing matches typical handwriting rates, and keeps them practising until their speed holds at or above their own handwriting rate. On CamelKeys, set tasks such students can pass, such as a test with only an accuracy target, and let them spend longer on each lesson.

A device is not the same as the skill: an article in CHADD's Attention magazine notes that when a student is allowed a computer or tablet instead of pen and paper, the arrangement often comes without any teaching of keyboarding. Typing is not the only route, either. New Zealand's Ministry of Education lists on-screen keyboards and voice typing next to keyboards as alternatives to handwriting for students with dyspraxia. Where a student has an occupational therapist, agree the targets with them.

Sources

• Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts: Writing, W.K.6 to W.8.6, Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2010.
• Texas Assessment Program Frequently Asked Questions, Texas Education Agency, 2025; and STAAR Redesign, Texas Education Agency.
• How Are AP Exams Administered?, College Board.
• “Typing Is Still a Foundational Skill. Do We Teach It That Way?”, Education Week, November 2024.
• Connelly, Gee and Walsh, “A comparison of keyboarded and handwritten compositions and the relationship with transcription speed”, British Journal of Educational Psychology 77, 2007.
• Dave Stuart Jr., “Keyboarding skills and the Common Core”.
• Elementary keyboarding, Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
• Keyboarding guidelines, Arlington Independent School District, Texas.
• Keyboarding expectations, Powderhorn Elementary, Jeffco Public Schools, Colorado.
• Keyboarding, grades 3 to 5, Wauwatosa School District elementary libraries, Wisconsin.
• Keyboarding, Wescott School, District 30, Illinois.
• Elementary Keyboarding standards and Keyboarding, Utah State Board of Education; Utah keyboarding, grade 3 (earlier standards), Common Planner.
• This and That, summer 2011 (keyboarding, with the National Business Education Association table of hours and speeds) and Model scope and sequence, Nebraska Department of Education.
• “What Typing Goals Should I Set for My Class?”, Typing Agent.
• “Reasonable typing speed benchmarks K–12”, Typesy.
• “Setting Goals with Your Typing Students”, Typing.com.
• Donica, Giroux and Faust, “Keyboarding instruction: Comparison of techniques for improved keyboarding skills in elementary students”, Journal of Occupational Therapy, Schools, & Early Intervention, 2018.
• Freeman, MacKinnon and Miller, “Keyboarding for Students with Handwriting Problems: A Literature Review”, Physical & Occupational Therapy in Pediatrics 25, 2005.
• Pollock and Missiuna, “To Write or to Type? That is the Question!”, CanChild, 2005.
• Gillespie, “We Can...Can They? Touch Typing for First Graders”, Ed.S. thesis, Valdosta State University, 2005.
• “When should children start learning keyboarding?”, Learning.com.
• Jacqui Murray, “What should you expect of younger keyboarders?”, January 2025.
• Keyboarding practice and keyboarding speed log, High Incidence Accessible Technology team, Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland.
• “The Double Whammy”, Attention magazine, CHADD, August 2024.
• Dyspraxia and learning, Inclusive Education guides, New Zealand Ministry of Education.