Online typing can be an alternative opportunity for children and adolescents to improve their fine motor skills, visual processing skills, and overall coordination. Let’s break down each skill and how typing can improve your child’s development in these necessary skills:
Fine motor skills: typing can improve your child’s fine motor skills through repetitive and refined practice. Research has shown that underdeveloped fine motor skills can impact a child’s handwriting speed, handwriting legibility, sizing and placing of letters, pencil grip, and much more. Typing is an alternative way to engage a child’s fingers and palms to increase their coordination, accuracy, and motor skills that can translate into other necessary tasks as they continue to age and grow.
Visual processing skills: typing can improve your child’s visual processing skills by visually scanning a screen to mimic correct patterns or sequences, such as words, sentences, or letters. Research has proven that typing significantly increases children’s and adolescents’ visual processing and motor skills which is extremely beneficial for a child’s overall development and self-independence. There are several online typing interventions that could benefit your child, such as typingclub.com, education.com/games/typing, and much more.
Coordination: typing can increase your child’s bilateral coordination, as well as their hand eye coordination. Bilateral and hand-eye coordination are essential within a child’s development, so that they may physically engage in tasks without significant difficulty. Children instinctively desire to type with only their index fingers, yet to improve their coordination, they must use all fingers in both of their hands with precise motions.
References
McGlashan, H. L., Blanchard, C. C. V., Sycamore, N. J., Lee, R., French, B., & Holmes, N. P. (2017). Improvement in children’s fine motor skills following a computerized typing intervention. Human Movement Science, 56(Part B), 29–36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.humov.2017.10.013
Comentários