Activities and Resources

Mavis loves language almost as much as typing and has increased her lesson and practice content in this version of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. The activities expand on that material and allow each student to learn typing and develop their language skills.

Learning to type offers students an enormous opportunity to extend the learning process through the use of lessons and activities that promote collateral learning while giving students an active role in their own educational process. One of Mavis’ greatest features is her ability to integrate outside typing materials into the program by creating texts for Custom Lessons. Here is the chance for you to “publish” essays; contribute favorite jokes and literary passages; enhance vocabulary, grammar, and punctuation skills; solve math word problems; and brush up on historical and scientific facts. Imagine your students studying their weekly vocabulary lists in a game interface such as Road Race or Shark Attack or practicing longer texts such as essays, poetry, and literary passages. Learning to type should never be painful or boring for students — Mavis’ strength is that it allows you to make it fun and challenging!

This section presents a number of activities that will help you challenge your typists with engaging exercises. These activities are written very broadly so as to provide ideas that might help you in your goal to improve your students’ typing, while at the same time incorporating other areas of the curriculum. Hopefully, you will be able to adapt and expand them to the needs of your particular classroom and students. Most of them involve creating a Custom Lesson, so it will be important that you know how to do this — refer to the User Guide for step-by-step instructions.

There are several ways you might use these activities:

1. Have students be your content providers. Photocopy the best submissions and use these as transcription for the entire class. Or, after collecting the submissions, pass them back in random fashion so that no student gets his/her own submission back. Then have students use this for practice. This would be especially appropriate for activities such as 12 and 13, but make sure that students agree to having others read their work, or arrange it so that students are not aware of whose submission they receive.
2. Use the suggestions to research your own content, or get content that your colleagues may be using and offer these as practice for your students. Create a custom lesson from an electronic file or photocopy for use as a transcription exercise.
3. With Activities such as 8 and 9, photocopy the lists provided and use these for transcription. Transfer these into an electronic file and add to it with suggestions from your students, then create a Custom lesson.