This stack grew from my experience home-schooling my own primary-aged youngsters. I discovered by watching them that, although their letters looked acceptable when finished, they were not forming their letters with the proper strokes. They were wasting a great deal of motion, effort, and time. Proper strokes are important, as they lead to fluency, speed, and ease in handwriting and expression. Children see plenty of examples of well-formed letters every day. What they don’t see is the proper stroke sequence required to achieve the letters. The sequence is typically represented in penmanship books by numbered arrows, but that requires a level of abstraction that not many young children have developed yet. So I created this stack to allow them to see “movies” of the letters being drawn.
Before you open it...
This stack uses color on color machines. Even if you do not have a color machine, do the following: Click once on your Hypercard or Hypercard Player application (not the Easy Writer icon!) Do a Get Info… from the File menu in the finder. Where it says preferred memory, type in 1500K or more. Otherwise it won’t have enough memory to do all its stuff.
Now, open the stack. The first time you open it you will probably be asked locate Platypus Common. You must do this or it will not work. After that, click the blurp if you want to see our cool new credits panel, or anywhere except the blurp if you want to get into the meat of it. Note: The first time you click the blurp icon you may be asked to locate the Platypus logo movie. It should be kept in the folder where Platypus Common is. If you do not have QuickTime‚Ñ¢ on your machine, you do not have to worry about this.
About this manual
This manual was prepared using DocMaker, and is designed to be used online. No index is necessary, as you can find any term you like by selecting Find from the File menu—just like you do in a word processor. Be sure to consult the Table of Contents in the Contents menu for an overview. You may go to any section listed in the table of contents by clicking on it. And naturally, you can select a chapter by name from the Contents menu as well.
