A Reason for Handwriting: A Timberdoodle Review

This post is an affiliate post.  In exchange for my personal and honest review, Timberdoodle sent me a free copy of this workbook.

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It’s that time of year when every teacher and every parent is suddenly pulling out the calendar and counting down the days.

Let’s just make it through, right?

Finish strong and all that.

But it’s also that time of year when most of us have to make decisions about our children’s education for next year.  Ugh.  Who designed this system?  This systems that says – just when you’re real tired and over and out with the current school year, just when you have given up trying to sign the folder to return to school each day and your kid is packing a handful of peanuts and some skittles for lunch daily and just when you have questioned why spelling matters and who needs those pesky times tables when we all have phones with calculators and when homeschool parents everywhere want to send all the children outside to play all the days, THAT’S when we need to sign up for next year’s classes or miss the deadline, beat the enrollment date or miss the discount, order your curriculum to get the best deal.

Sigh and an angry fist pound on the table – if I had energy left to hit the table with emphatic force.

And so I bring you today – a simple review for an easy yes.

A Reason for Handwriting.

Continued handwriting practice is critical.  It develops hand eye coordination and fine motor skills – and, oh yeah – better handwriting.

Generally speaking, I’m not an advocate of workbooks.  I think they’re frequently asking less of the student than that student is capable of providing.  

(And as a teacher of junior high and high school students, quality handwriting is NOT a relic of the past.  We need it still.  I want it for my students and for my brain as I read their papers.)  The written word is not dead.  I don’t particularly care if you use cursive or tidy print, but I do care that it is readable.  (Although, if you let me, I could make a great case for the reasons why cursive is still valuable.)

But this is not exactly a workbook – although technically, of course, it is.

Think of it more as – a task that needs to be done, that benefits your child, that requires nothing of you as a parent.

But for real.

There are moments in every home school day in which a student needs to both work independently and to be occupied.  But neither of us – parent nor student – desires to waste time on twaddle or busy work.  Enter in this copy work/handwriting practice tool.

It’s simple, straight forward and gets the job done.

All we ever want from a guide.  

You can choose print or cursive style and let your child progress along, one section a day.  By the end of the week they are writing a memory verse completely on their own and you allowed them some basic independence over their own work and you didn’t need to print out special cursive practice pages or choose a section from a novel for them to copy.  (All great methods, but during some years and certain seasons, you really need a “hand it to them and move on” sort of tactic.)

And that is this tactic.  Nicely executed.

You can see sample pages here at Timberdoodle and order it there as well.

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