Typing for kids

Most children are ready for real typing lessons between about 8 and 10. Here is how to teach them without draining the fun.

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In Australia's national literacy tests, children in Year 3 write their essay on paper. Two years later, in Year 5, they type it. There's a reason for the gap. When the New South Wales education department compared online and paper writing tests in primary schools in 2016, the median Year 3 pupil typed 9 words per minute, which the report notes is slower than children that age usually write by hand. Most of the schools in the trial didn't explicitly teach keyboarding at all.

Somewhere between those two years is the age most curricula and researchers settle on for proper typing lessons. Before it, a keyboard is something to explore. After it, typing is part of schoolwork, and a child who taught themselves with two fingers has a habit to undo.

What age should kids learn to type?

Education systems word it differently, but they land in roughly the same place.

In the US, the Common Core standards for English bring keyboarding in step by step. From kindergarten to grade 2, children explore and use digital tools for writing, with an adult's help. Grade 3, at ages 8 to 9, is the first to name keyboarding skills. Grade 4 sets a target: enough keyboarding skill to "type a minimum of one page in a single sitting". Grade 5 asks for two pages and grade 6 for three.

The standards don't say what a page is. Call a double-spaced page 250 words: a child typing 10 words per minute needs 25 minutes just to get the words down, before any time spent deciding what to say.

England's national curriculum doesn't require typing at all, and its computing programme of study never mentions it. The Department for Education's writing framework, published in July 2025, suggests teaching typing formally in upper key stage 2 (Years 5 and 6, ages 9 to 11), when most pupils have enough dexterity, coordination and hand span. Before that, it says, getting to know the keyboard in computing lessons is enough.

Research points the same way. A 2005 review of keyboarding studies in a paediatric occupational therapy journal concluded that the upper elementary years are a good time to start, and the New South Wales report says most research recommends the upper primary years.

That's a recommendation, not a wall. In a 2002 pilot study, 32 second graders, aged 7 to 8, had a typing lesson every day for eight months, and by the end their average typing speed came close to typical handwriting speed for their grade. Younger children can learn; it takes them longer.

Hands are only half of it. When researchers in Israel tested 57 fourth graders in 2023, reading speed predicted how well they typed better than anything else they measured, fine motor skills included. That makes sense: you can't copy a word faster than you can read it.

Signs a child is ready

• They read simple sentences without sounding out every word.
• They know their letters, capitals and small, without hunting for them.
• They can rest four fingers of each hand on the home row without stretching.
• They can press a key with one finger while the others stay put.
• They can concentrate on one thing for ten minutes.

So under 7, let them explore. Typing their own name or a message to a grandparent teaches where letters live, and nobody needs lessons for that. From 7 or 8, short lessons are fine if the child is keen and ticks most of those boxes. Between about 8 and 10, most children are ready. Older than that, start now: the homework is only going to get longer.

One thing typing shouldn't do at this age is push out handwriting. England's framework says typing shouldn't be prioritised at the expense of handwriting, and typing vs handwriting explains why the two are worth teaching side by side.

How to teach a child to type

Ten minutes a day beats an hour on Saturday

The case for short, frequent practice goes back to a 1978 study by Alan Baddeley and D. J. A. Longman. They trained four groups of postmen to type postcodes on a typewriter keyboard, in sessions of one or two hours, once or twice a day. The one-hour-a-day group learned the keyboard in about 35 hours of training. The group doing two two-hour sessions a day needed about 50: they finished sooner on the calendar, but used 15 more hours to get there.

Those were adults in hour-long sessions. For an eight-year-old, ten minutes is about right: two or three runs through a lesson, then stop while the fingers are still neat. Five short sessions a week will usually do more than two long ones. Set a daily goal of 10 minutes and let the streak and the browser reminders do the nagging, so you don't have to.

Home row first, and the same finger every time

Everything starts from the home row: left fingers on A S D F, right fingers on J K L ;, thumbs over the space bar. The bumps on F and J let a child find it without looking. Each finger then looks after its own column of keys and goes back home after every press. Home row keys has the details, plus practice words that use only those keys.

The bit children resist is using the same finger for the same key. Two index fingers feel quicker at first, and for a few weeks they are. But in a 2016 study, researchers at Aalto University in Finland filmed 30 adult typists, and pressing each letter with the same finger every time was one of three habits that set the fast typists apart, whatever their style. If D is always the left middle finger, that finger learns where D is. If it's whichever finger is nearest, the eyes have to do the work.

Cover the hands

Children look at the keys because looking works. So take it away: drape a tea towel over their hands and the keyboard, or cut the end off a shoebox and put it over the keys. It feels silly for a day or two. When they lose a letter, they look up at the on-screen keyboard in the lessons, where every key is coloured by the finger that presses it and two hands are drawn over the top.

Accuracy first, and praise the right thing

Speed grows out of accuracy, not the other way round. The lessons won't pass a run below 94% accuracy, a good line to hold at home too. Their speed targets start at 8 WPM, about where that median Year 3 pupil was, and rise to about 25 by the end of the letter lessons.

Be careful what you cheer. Whoop at a fast run full of mistakes and you've taught a child that speed is what counts. Praise a clean run, a lesson passed on the third try, five days in a row, hands that stayed under the towel. Don't compare speeds between siblings either: an older brother or sister has a head start that has nothing to do with effort, and the younger one will notice. The speed badges here start at 30 WPM, which says something about when speed should become the point.

A setup that fits a small body

Most children practise at a table built for adults, which puts the keyboard near chest height and the screen above their eyes. Guidelines on children's computer use, published by a team of ergonomics researchers in 2010, suggest some simple fixes:

• Raise the seat until the desk is at about elbow height, then support the feet: on the floor if they reach, on a box or a pile of books if they don't.
• Put the top of the screen at about eye height, roughly an arm's length away and straight ahead.
• Use a thin, flat keyboard, and a smaller one for smaller hands. One without a number pad lets the mouse sit closer.
• On a laptop, add a separate keyboard for regular practice, so the screen can go up without the keys going with it.

This is general comfort advice, not medical advice. If a child has pain in the hands, wrists or neck that doesn't go away, talk to a doctor. Typing posture covers the rest of the setup.

If your child already hunts and pecks

Plenty of children turn up to their first lesson typing with two fingers, sometimes alarmingly fast. Don't ban it for homework on day one: touch typing with half a keyboard is miserable and teaches nothing but resentment. Touch type in practice sessions while the letters are being learned, then switch everything over once they know them all. Expect a week or two when the old way feels faster, because it is. That dip is where most switches fail, adults' included, and how to type without looking explains how to get through it.

Tablets, phones and real keyboards

Touch typing needs a physical keyboard. Glass has no bumps on F and J, and fingers can't rest on the home row without typing something. If the family computer is a tablet, a plug-in or wireless keyboard turns it into something a child can learn on. Phone typing is a different skill, done with two thumbs and both eyes, and none of the finger habits carry over. The typing tests here work on phones, but do the lessons at a keyboard.

Lessons or games?

Typing games have one big advantage: children will play them for far longer than they'll sit through anything that looks like a lesson. A good game teaches where the letters are, and a child who's enjoying it comes back tomorrow. The weakness is that no game can see which finger pressed a key, and many don't introduce the keys in any order, so a child can win with two index fingers and a lot of determination.

One of the larger comparisons is a two-year study of 1,306 children in US elementary schools, published in 2021. One group followed a structured keyboarding curriculum both years. The other spent the first year on free web-based activities, which for the younger children were mostly games, and then switched to the curriculum. Both groups got faster and more accurate. The structured group improved more in grades 2 to 4 and had better technique in every grade.

So use both, in that order: the lesson first, the game as the reward. CamelKeys has lessons, not games. The closest thing to a game here is a live race: start a private room, send the link to a cousin or a grandparent, and up to five of you type the same 30 words. Keep races for Fridays, once accuracy is steady, because racing makes everybody rush.

What progress looks like

Learning where the keys are is the quick part. The plan below covers the letters in four weeks of ten-minute sessions, and plenty of children need six. Becoming fluent takes far longer.

The 2005 review estimated that children may need 25 to 30 hours of instruction in all. That sounds like a lot until you divide it up. Ten minutes a day, five days a week, is 50 minutes a week, so 30 hours takes 36 weeks: about a school year. England's framework gives a contrasting example. A 30-minute lesson every week for 36 weeks adds up to 18 hours, and the framework says research suggests pupils taught that way are unlikely to type automatically and will still type more slowly than they write.

The second graders in the 2002 study had a lesson every day for eight months before their typing came close to typical handwriting speeds. So don't expect typing to overtake handwriting by the summer holidays. Aim for accurate fingers in the first couple of months, and slow, steady gains after that. Typing speed by age has the speeds children typically reach.

Keeping it private and safe

A child can use this site without an account: tests and lessons work signed out, progress stays in that browser, and nobody has to enter a name or an email address. Signing in syncs progress across devices. If your child does have an account, their profile stays private while they're under 13, and students in school classes are never shown publicly.

You'll see 13 a lot online because of a US law: the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act puts extra rules on websites that collect personal information from children under 13. Wherever your child types, a few habits help:

• Use a nickname rather than a full name, and leave out the school, the town and the photo.
• Before creating any account, check what it makes public: profiles, leaderboards, shared results.
• For races, start a private room and send the link only to people you know. Quick race matches you with whoever is online.
• With younger children, keep the computer somewhere you can see the screen.

For teachers: running it as a class

The classes feature handles the record keeping. Create a class and you get a six-letter code and a join link; students join with either. Set a timed test as a task with a due date, and the class dashboard shows who has done it, along with each student's runs, best speed, accuracy, XP and when they last practised. Export it as a CSV file for reports or parents' evenings. One class of up to 15 students is free.

Students need a free account so their results save to the class, so check your school's rules on pupil accounts first. Their profiles are never shown publicly. For timetabling, the arithmetic above applies: ten minutes at the start of four or five lessons a week will usually do more than one long session in the computer room.

A four-week plan for ages 8 to 10

Ten minutes a day, five days a week, hands covered from day one. Each session: one run of yesterday's lesson as a warm-up, then today's lesson until it's passed or the time is up. A run is 25 short words, so two or three fit in a session. The lesson numbers are for a QWERTY keyboard.

Week 3 is where the speed targets pass 20 WPM. If a child keeps reaching 94% but falls a few WPM short, let them move on and come back to it: lessons aren't locked, and the later lessons build speed too. If a lesson takes two days, it takes two days.

At the end of week 4, take a first 15-second or 10-word typing test for a baseline. The results show the slowest keys and build a short drill from them. After that, the numbers (lessons 19 to 21) and punctuation and symbols (22 to 25) can go at one lesson every couple of days, with the final review, lesson 26, at the end. From week 5, everything typed at home gets touch typed: homework, emails to grandparents, the shopping list.

Where to start

Pick a slot that already exists in the day, straight after school or just before screen time, so practice never needs negotiating. Set the chair, find a tea towel and open lesson 1 together. Ten minutes on F and J, a word of praise for every clean run, and stop while it's still fun. Tomorrow, lesson 2.

Sources

• National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers, “Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects”, 2010, Writing standard 6 for kindergarten to grade 6 (PDF).
• Department for Education, “National curriculum in England: computing programmes of study”, 2013 (GOV.UK).
• Department for Education, “The writing framework”, July 2025, section 3, Typing (GOV.UK).
• NSW Department of Education, Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation, “Are writing scores from online writing tests for primary students comparable to those from paper tests?”, 2021 (report).
• Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, “NAPLAN: writing test” FAQ (nap.edu.au).
• Freeman, MacKinnon and Miller, “Keyboarding for students with handwriting problems: a literature review”, Physical & Occupational Therapy in Pediatrics 25(1–2), 2005 (doi).
• Chwirka, Gurney and Burtner, “Keyboarding and visual-motor skills in elementary students: a pilot study”, Occupational Therapy in Health Care 16(2–3), 2002 (doi).
• Gahshan-Haddad and Weintraub, “Underlying functions associated with keyboarding performance of elementary-school students”, Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy 30(8), 2023 (doi).
• Baddeley and Longman, “The influence of length and frequency of training session on the rate of learning to type”, Ergonomics 21(8), 1978 (doi).
• Feit, Weir and Oulasvirta, “How We Type: Movement Strategies and Performance in Everyday Typing”, CHI 2016 (project page).
• Straker, Maslen, Burgess-Limerick, Johnson and Dennerlein, “Evidence-based guidelines for the wise use of computers by children: physical development guidelines”, Ergonomics 53(4), 2010 (doi).
• Donica, Giroux, Kim and Branson, “A comparison of two keyboarding instruction methods over 2 years for elementary students”, The Open Journal of Occupational Therapy 9(3), 2021 (doi); the comparison group's activities are described in Branson's master's thesis, East Carolina University, 2018.
• US Federal Trade Commission, “Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA)” (ftc.gov).