Not so many years ago we spent time teaching young children how to work a computer mouse. But then computer-savvy children arrived knowing exactly how a it worked.

Enter the era of tablets! Touch screens are the norm now and we’re back to providing mouse practice: when to click, when to click and drag, and so on.

Fortunately there are lots of fun games to help students with those skills. We practiced several with our kindergartners yesterday in the lab. I have several links on my TVS TechnoWizards website. They really enjoyed the activities as they had lots of practice with mouse skills.

The funniest thing happened though. One child had her name card on the monitor (the signal that the student needs help) so I went over to check on her. In a very frustrated voice, she announced, “I can’t get it to go down. What I want to do is down there and it won’t move.” As she spoke, her little fingers were doing their very best to touch that monitor and scroll that page down so that she could find what she was looking for! Gently, I moved her fingers down to the mouse and demonstrated how to use it to scroll down the page. “Oh, I get it now,” was her sweet reply.

Times have changed . . .