Building Mouse Skills

Helping students to develop mouse skills can be a challenge. There are free activities online for helping children to build mouse skills. There are games and various drawing programs (see previous posting "Sites to Support Students with Special Needs" for a listing of drawing programs) that provide simple mouse practice for the beginning mouser. Below you will find some activities designed to help build mouse skill success:

• BillyBear4Kids provides simple mix and match on-line games for young children.

• Browser Books provides on-line PowerPoint type books where children read a story and click the arrow to turn the page.
  

• Bubble Wrap is just what it says- imagine! Virtual Bubble Wrap. You must use your mouse to pop the individual bubbles.
  

• Color Vehicles (from HelpKidzLearn), Color Dinosaurs (from HelpKidzLearn), Coloring Activities (from Priory Woods School) and Coloring (from Ziggity Zoom) Provide coloring pages where the students click on a color and then click on a part of the picture to have it colored in.
  

• Early Mouse Skills offers a growing collection of drag and drop activities to help develop early mouse skills.
  

• Find The Animal or Find the Vegetable (Papunet Games) provides pictures that respond when you click the mouse (or switch). You can choose “Settings” after choosing the activity to adjust the frequency of visual obstructions.

• Fireworks is exactly what it says it is. Click the o mouse and you will be rewarded with virtual fireworks.
  

• Inclusive Technologies has dedicated 4 activities for building mouse skills.

• Danbury, Connecticut Schools has a Kindergarten page with a nice little section on building mouse skills. The activities are provided in a simple format that keeps you calm and focused. Entertaining!

• Lil’ Fingers provides early learning with mouse use. Nice simple graphics with great audio.

• Mouse Practice provides a listing of games, puzzles, Mr. Potato, Memory games, plus much more.
  

• Mouse Program provides simple (but not too young) activities for learning how to use all aspects of the mouse.

• Mousing Around provides games that provide clicking at different levels.

• Pop It! Balloon Pop Game really makes you work that mouse. As the balloons float up you must try to click on them dead center to make them burst. Pop The Bubbles allows you to change the speed which is a great bonus for the next level. The bubbles are smaller than the balloons so takes a little more skill.

• PRTV is a great little interactive playhouse for all ages. Makes you work that mouse!
  

• Singing Horses is a great simple program that even adults will have fun with!
  

If a child has a hard time understanding the connection between, "when I do this over here, that happens over there" when using a mouse, you may consider puttine the mouse in front of the montior (keybaord up and away for now) on a slant board. This will draw the eyes up and allow the child to see their hand and the screen at the same time. You may also want to try enlarging the mouse or using a software program which will make the mouse larger or flashy such as Biggy by RJ Cooper or any of the numerous free programs available online.

For more, try the Shambles site which includes an extensive listing of mouse skill development sites along with explanations for each listing.