StartWrite Review
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WOW! I love this software! For teaching your younger children penmanship
this is an excellent program. Let me elaborate and tell you how we are
using this program in our house. 

It prints letters, numbers, sentences or whatever you type, using plain
paper. You have a choice of guidelines with triple lines, single underline
or no lines. It will make and print lessons in either portrait or
landscape positions. You can adjust the light and dark of the print as
well as the tracing from dots to solid lines. You can also add arrows to
show pencil placement and movement. 

The best part there is printing whatever you like. This means you can use
your weekly spelling list, a Bible memory verse or anything you decide! We
are using it for Katheryne to learn how to write her alphabet and numbers.
We are also using it for Hannah and Katheryne to learn how to write their
names out. With my older kids I just wrote out their verse or study words
on the lined paper and had them trace and practice it. This is a timesaver
and using plain paper is much cheaper too. 

I see myself using this down the road with dictation where Katheryne can
dictate a book review to me and then I can print it out for her to
practice on. There are so many ways you can use this and the
personalization of the program is what makes it so good. Oh, you can also
save your lesson pages. So let’s say that you type out a new Bible verse
each week for a year and save all the lessons. Then when your next child
is ready to write you only print out the file from before. All it would
take is a little preparation to come up with a file naming convention on
your own PC, print when needed and your done. 

There are some lesson templates included with the software as well as some
clipart. You can also bring in any of your own clipart too which would
make it fun to bring in clips from a Bible story to match a verse.

For Rebecca we are going to write out her verses and word lists in cursive
to give her at least another year of good handwriting practice. The nice
thing is that I can leave out the arrows, make the dots light and far
apart where as for Katheryne I will leave the arrows on, the dots close
together and much darker. I think you can see the versatility this product
offers. 

Included with StartWrite are the Manuscript (Zaner Bloser), Modern
Manuscript (D'Nealian), Italic (Getty-Dubay or Portland Italic) and
Cursive font styles. You can also use your own font styles if you have
something else you prefer. You can make the print as large or as small as
needed, larger for a beginning writer and smaller for an older child. 

Cost of $49.90 is reasonable considering you will use it many years and if
you have several children then it is a really cost effective. I am sure
that you could approach them for multiple order discounts if your support
group wanted to get 10 or more. Go to their website to see the online demo
and you can download a sample version of the program. As always, please
check it out for yourself to make sure it is something your family can
really benefit from. For us, this is and will continue to be a very handy
tool in our home. 

Idea Maker Inc.
StartWrite Software
80 So. Redwood Rd. Suite 212
North Salt Lake, UT 84054
Toll Free 1-888-974-8322 
(801)-294-7779
info@startwrite.com
http://www.startwrite.com

System Requirements
IBM or compatible 486 (Pentium Rec.)
Win 3.1/95/98 
Macintosh Ver. 7.5.5
8 MB RAM (16 MB Rec.)