Games to play to improve students’ typing skills

A few days ago I published a short video about an interesting way to improve your typing skills while reading classic literature. That video prompted a reader to send me an email this morning asking if I had any suggestions for typing practice sites for elementary school students. Following are the things that I recommend to him.

TypeTastic is a site that offers over 700 free typing games for students of all ages. TypeTastic is designed for students to work through game units. Each game is preceded by a new skill introduction or review of previous skills. Each division has multiple levels for students to work on in each game. It may take students an hour or more to master each game completely.

Flippity offers a free Google Sheets template for your students to design their own online typing activities for play. To do this you simply make a copy of the template provided by Flippity then fill in the words and phrases you want to present in your activity. Flippity hosts activity and provides unique URLs for your activity to share with your students. In this video I provide a demonstration of how the template works. (Please note that the video starts with a Google Sheets add-on that is no longer available. Instead, just get the template here on Flippity.net).

ABCya offers games designed to help elementary school students hone their skills in a variety of fields. ABCya’s game catalog includes a fun typing game called Cup Stacking. In this game students have to type the letters they see on the cups displayed on their screen. The cups pile up in a pyramid when they type the correct letters. Once the pyramid is created, the students have to type the letters again to construct the pyramid. The aim of the game is to build and lower the pyramids as quickly as possible.

Typing Rocket is another typing game developed by ABCya. Typing Rocket is a sixty second game where students type the characters displayed on the game’s rockets and explode fireworks. In the sixty second span of the game the students try to type as accurately as possible. The speed of the rocket increases as the game progresses.

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