Keyboarding Without Tears Homeschool Reviews 2023: Is It Good?
Read this Keyboarding Without Tears review and then decide whether it is good for your homeschoolers.
The six-level Keyboarding Without Tears (KWT) curriculum is designed for students in kindergarten through fifth grade. To teach keyboarding fundamentals and safe digital practices, the program includes typing games and exercises in addition to classroom work. So, is it safe for your kids?
We will examine every facet of Keyboarding Without Tears (KWT) in this review.
What is Keyboarding Without Tears?
Keyboarding Without Tears is a program for elementary school students that teaches typing and computer skills. It was developed by Learning Without Tears, the company behind the well-known Handwriting Without Tears program.
Through a combination of explicit instruction, typing games, and various digital activities and exercises, this web-based program aids students in mastering fundamental keyboard familiarity and use as well as computer and digital safety.
Pros
- Easy to Use
- Very portable
- Doesn’t require a ton of parental time and effort
- Lots of Cross-Curricular Learning
- Fun, game-like activities
- Short lessons
- Units on digital citizenship and safety can be very helpful
Cons
- Requires internet access
- Not a huge amount of real-time feedback for students
What Ages Or Grades is Keyboarding Without Tears Intended For?
Those in grades K–5, or roughly ages 5–10, should use Keyboarding Without Tears.
The curriculum is progressive, grade-leveled, and kind of a full-suite introduction to typing and digital tools that disperses its content over multiple grades to achieve fluency, i.e. accuracy and speed in computer use and typing.
| Grade | Some Of the TheTopics Covered |
| K | Introduction to keyboards, mice, touchscreens, introduction to home row and keys, unilateral hand use and placement, and more |
| 1+2 | Two-hand placement, simple letter combinations, digraphs, numbers and symbols, first short sentence runs, capitalization, and more |
| 3 | Number and function key fluency, capital letter and sentence use, forms, simple numeracy, and math functions, scrolling, essential reading comprehension skills, typing assigned work, simple paragraphs and formatting, and more |
| 4 | Complex sentences, speed and accuracy development, typing assigned work, formatting, paragraph work, test taking, writing exercises, and more |
| 5 | Formatting, test taking, more advanced paragraph and sentence fluency, complex response writing, fancy formatting, and more |
Keyboarding Without Tears allows parents and students to select the grade level at which they want to learn because it can be used by both homeschooling families and those in conventional classrooms. To be clear, the program is more than just a straightforward typing and computer program.
A significant portion of the activities in Keyboarding Without Tears also make use of grade-leveled cross-curricular learning materials from a variety of subjects, many of which can be assumed to have some level of preexisting knowledge or familiarity with the subject, as well as on-grade reading and comprehension skills.
While certainly an interesting and potentially useful addition to a typing program, it is something that parents of students learning at a different grade progression should consider.
How Does Keyboarding Without Tears Work?
Keyboarding Without Tears is a year-long keyboard and computer skills program that is accessible on computers, laptops, and most tablets. Each grade contains 36 weeks of lessons at a 3-day-a-week schedule, with each lesson intended to be about 5-10 minutes long (or about 45 minutes a week).
Homeschooling parents set their students’ grades once they have purchased a license; following that, students can create a password, sign in, and begin working. Students will be swiftly introduced to a lesson activity after signing in.
As we already mentioned, unlike other learning programs, it is a very guided process and students don’t really have the opportunity to click or skip between lessons, which greatly simplifies the learning process and keeps everything reasonably organized and sequential.
There is an optional review component (about six weeks worth) that covers the program’s methodology and fundamental keyboarding and computer skills at the start of each grade or level.
Parents can choose to skip this if a student is moving up from a previous level, but we believe it can be very helpful for those entering the program in a later grade because it can quickly bring students up to speed.
The program’s lessons are presented in the form of brief audio-visual lessons and interactive activities for use in homeschooling. When a student encounters an activity for the first time, a brief animated video demonstration of what to do will play. This video can be viewed at any time by clicking the camera icon in the top right corner of the screen.
Many of the program’s activities are diverse and cover a wide range of topics, but they are also fairly simple to understand and frequently operate in the same way. Students are given a task to complete using the keyboard and/or mouse after listening to (typically) an audio instruction.
For instance, in the game Painted Fingers, students have to use the finger that is displayed on the screen to press a key that corresponds to a particular color. This exercise improves accuracy and muscle memory. To increase their speed and accuracy, students could participate in another activity where they practice typing targets.
Who is Keyboarding Without Tears Ideal For?
These homeschoolers are the target users of Keyboarding Without Tears:
Homeschools Looking for a Thorough Keyboarding and Computer Skills Program
Keyboarding Without Tears gives students a ton of focused and productive practice in a variety of areas, including typing, mouse control, touch screen use, document formatting, and more through its games and activities.
Busy Parents Who Want Students to Be Able to Practice on Their Own
When teaching multiple students or having a busy schedule, Keyboarding Without Tears can help students move from activity to activity without the need for constant parental supervision.
Students Who Hate Typing Drills
Instead of the usual drill-based typing exercises, Keyboarding Without Tears offers a variety of animated, interactive exercises that resemble mini-games rather than focused typing practice.
Parents Looking for Something to Integrate into a Broader, On-grade Curricula
With its cross-curricular learning in science, history, social studies, and language arts, as well as digital citizenship classes, Keyboarding Without Tears can be a great option for homeschools looking for a program that goes beyond simple typing exercises.
Parents Looking for any time, Anywhere Keyboard Practice
Keyboarding Without Tears is accessible through browsers and apps, and can be used whenever there is an internet connection on a variety of devices.
Homeschools Looking for a Good Digital Safety Program
Additionally, Keyboarding Without Tears offers optional lessons on data privacy, appropriate internet usage, online communication, and much more. These are all crucial lessons that we believe students in this day and age should learn.
Who Is It Not Ideal For?
But maybe some students should not use this program for the reasons listed below:
Homeschooling Students Who Are Far Ahead Or Behind Grade Level
While Keyboarding Without Tears does incorporate Common Core standards and grade-appropriate content into its practice exercises, students who are learning at a pace that is faster or slower than the typical grade progression may find these materials to be too challenging or too easy.
Those Who Want to Create Their Own Learning Plan
A very user-friendly keyboarding program called Keyboarding Without Tears allows parents to make some minor adjustments to their dashboards. But ultimately, it’s a guided program, so parents aren’t really free to rearrange and restructure the curriculum.
Price
At 10$ a license, it’s not totally unreasonable, however, if you compare it to many other typing programs, it starts to look less of a value. The majority of programs have a one-time cost and are transferable between students.
KWT charges per student, per year. Over the years, a larger family would wind up shelling out a sizable sum. This price does get you a good program, so it’s hard to complain, but if you run the numbers, it could do better.
Is It Worth the Price?
Although there are many free typing programs available, few are as feature-rich as Keyboarding Without Tears, and we believe it can be a useful tool for the right homeschooling families.
The program is very user-friendly, and the animated game-like activities it offers are entertaining, varied, multisensory, and generally make practicing typing much more interesting than the typical typing drills used by most programs.
The program also keeps its lessons brief and to the point, typically requiring only a few minutes of work per day to help students hone their skills, making it well-suited to homeschooling students with busier schedules and those who find it difficult to sit through long lessons.
Furthermore, for just over $10 per student per year, Keyboarding Without Tears provides much more than basic typing practice. Every level has a wide range of cross-curricular learning opportunities built into its activities that can support learning in other subject areas like science, language arts, history, and geography.
The program also offers a lot of enrichment opportunities and, through its digital citizenship lessons, even teaches students how to use computers and the internet more efficiently and (perhaps more importantly) how to stay safe while doing so.
Conclusion: Keyboarding Without Tears Homeschool Reviews
Keyboarding Without Tears can, in a way, assist students in becoming more effective (and safer) users of technology with its condensed lessons, animated and interactive games, and intriguing cross-curricular learning integrations.
Compared with other typing programs, Keyboarding Without Tears spends less time on the basics and more time on haphazard practice. In contrast to other curricula, this one spends most of the school year delving into whole words and paragraphs alongside the fundamentals.
