How Children can Support Their Learning to Write and Read by Computer in the Early Years of School

Over the last decades the nature and form of what children can choose to read has changed radically, partly as a consequence of rapid technological advances and the increasing dominance of the image. The research questions were: 1) How do children learn to read and write by computer? 2) How can one support children’s learning during the transition from pre-school to primary school? and 3) How can we support learning during the transition from pre-school to primary school in the future? This work is based on a questionnaire that was sent to kindergarten and primary school teachers in the Helsinki area. Only 27 teachers in the pre-school or primary school answered the questionnaire. Following this, the questionnaire was also sent to kindergarten and primary school student teachers. The results show that that it is easy for children to acquaint themselves with the computer keyboard and that children actually enjoy playing by writing on computer. The respondents said that children must, at first, train to write by hand, then by computer.