StartWrite question

[kimmyandgracie]

I have been browsing the StartWrite website and it looks very interesting to me. I am wondering if it could be used as a handwriting program by itself, or if I would still need to use a regular handwriting program. What do you think?

[Ali in OR]

I think you could probably use StartWrite as a handwriting program by making your own writing worksheets. We did this a bit when my dd needed more help learning cursive than her book provided. She benefitted from doing a lot more tracing of letters and words (rather than copying) and this was easy for me to set up on StartWrite. So if you want to customize a program for your dc, this is an easy way to do it.

 

I don't think it saves money since you have to print out all of your sheets, and even though StartWrite is quick and easy, it does still take time to print off sheets every week. If all you need to cover is handwriting, buying a handwriting book would probably be an easier way to go. But if you want to cover handwriting through copywork, StartWrite is one way to get there.

[Kelli in TN]

I use StartWrite and my Getty Dubay teacher's manual for my penmanship course. I prefer making my own handwriting sheets to using a workbook. Just make sure that you are looking for trouble spots and focus on them when designing your sheets.

[Debbie in OR]

We use StartWrite as our handwriting spine as well because I like the freedom of choosing great material for them to copy, practice on, etc... I prefer Italic for my dc so about 2x a month, I will sit down with my Bible, or Great Quotes from Presidents or Chronicles of Narnia books or The Book of Virtues or some poetry book (or whatever else is worthy) and pull out things for the kids to copy. So while they are practicing their handwriting, they are also filling their minds with what is good and worthy. Plus, as they progress, you can adjust the size font, size of the lines, whether they are outlining or truly copying, etc..

[Mom2GirlsTX]

I used it to simply type out what I wanted them to memorize so if that week we are memorizing a poem, I did lines from the poem. Sometimes it was Bible versus..it can be a teach them to write program, but is a little bit of work doing the typing and printing. I liked it because I could "kill two birds with one stone" in that I used what the practiced for handwriting to learn other things, like memorization.

[kimmyandgracie]

I appreciate all your input. From your posts, it sounds like this (or educational fontware?) would be a good fit for our family. A lot of the things you mentioned (memorization, copywork, letters to trace) sound like a lot of the things I would want from a handwriting program. I like the idea of being able to customize my handwriting lessons to what the children need at the time. I also like the idea of using the teacher's manual with startwrite to organize the handwriting program. Kelli in TN, could you tell me a little more about how that works?