By Joy Marie Dunlap
LightHome Publications
www.LightHome.net
publisher@lighthome.net
27695 Blue Diamond Lane
Romoland, CA 92585-9019
Do your students love the animal kingdom? Are they studying animals in science? Then this handwriting book is the perfect complement for your homeschool.
Exotic Animals is a 50-page book of copywork for grades 4-9. It comes as an e-book in PDF format; after paying for it, you simply download it to your computer and print out what you need. It's immediately available, and you have no shipping charges! Each page has an exotic, unusual animal for each letter of the alphabet; there are two pages per animal. The first page contains an illustration of the animal, and a paragraph about the animal; underneath are about 10-11 blank lines for copying the paragraph. A fun directive is to circle the most interesting sentence. There are a few words to unscramble for some variety. On the second page, students find a beautiful line drawing of the animal in its habitat (which can be colored), along with more information about it. At the very end of the book is a word search.
The animals in this copybook are truly exotic! How about an echidna, a numbat, or a saiga? The illustrations are detailed and very professional, and the text is fascinating. Your students will love learning about some very interesting and unusual creatures.
For cursive practice, the model sentences are in a basic cursive font.
It's not too slanted, not too loopy, and very easy to read. While the copywork
passage is fascinating reading, it may be difficult to copy, as it's rather long
and factual in style. One drawback might be that the guidelines are very small.
They are even smaller than the model text. I found them a bit difficult to write
on myself. This could be hard for younger students. Note that there is no cursive
instruction in this copybook.
How do you use this book? There are many ways to make it fit your school. You can print only the sheets you need as you need them. Another option is to print them all out, store them in a folder, and hand them out as needed. Perhaps you could coordinate pages with your science studies. You can also print them all and make them into a book, hole punching and inserting them into a report cover or binder, or stapling them with a heavy-duty stapler. I printed mine on regular white printer paper, and it seems durable enough for writing and coloring. It seems to me that printing them all out at once is the best way to make sure you don't forget about them. I absolutely love the convenience of e-books and have downloaded many to my computer, but I do find that I forget about them if I don't print them right away.
This copybook is a very large file. Be patient when downloading, and make sure your Internet connection doesn't time out or "crash" or you'll have to start over. It took me several tries to get my copy downloaded, but it was worth the effort! I just love this copybook, and I know you will too.
Product review by Jennifer Loucks, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, August 2009
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