StartWrite

My First Review!

I thought long and hard about what to review first. I have several favorites and I can’t wait to review those, but I thought I’d better keep it simple at first.

In light of that, my first review is going to be… StartWrite!

I have to say, I wish I had found this on day one with child one. All the money I would have saved on handwriting workbooks!

It basically works like Word, but instead of all the Word fonts, it has several handwriting style choices. I liked this because I was able to choose the handwriting style that would best fit each of my children. It was easier to teach my dyslexic kids using the Handwriting Without Tears font, though my more artistic child liked the Italics font better.

Also, you can adjust the size and style of the lines and letters. You can adjust it to where your student can copy over dotted letters or highlighted letters, or you can type out a passage in a font you prefer, then leave lines underneath for the student to copy the passage.

This was especially helpful for my dyslexic students. They did not have to transfer it from one paper to another and they could mark out a word after they wrote it so they did not lose their place.

Here are some examples from earlier last school year of some of my children’s copy work using StartWrite.





In my opinion, StartWrite is worth every penny. You get to choose the font, the spaces, the line size, and even what is written.

The only downside (if you can call it that) is that you do actually have to sit down at your computer and make out the pages for your student. You can’t just hand them a workbook to do. When I first started using this program, sometimes I would forget to do that and would find myself furiously typing away come Monday morning!

In that way it is a bit more time consuming than a workbook, but I feel the small time commitment was worth the return, in that I had all the choices.

One side note. I personally prefer buying the actual CDRom instead of the download. You do this by clicking on 'Select Startwrite Single Computer Version' then you will get the option to buy the CDRom and have it delivered to your house. The price is the same thought you have to pay $5.00 extra for shipping. I like having the CDRom because it lets me use it on the several different computers we have in the house.