Best classic writing software for students

[lawson89]

I am re-purposing a PB3400c and an old HP laserprinter into a writing "center" for my middle school age child. I have ClarisWorks5 but remember in the distant past a program called The Writing Center which may be more suitable for younger students.

Any recommendations ?

Thanks,
Rick

[Turboladdade]

Younger like kindergarten age?

[lawson89]

a little older, say 4th - 6th grade for my current project

although recommendations for other age ranges would be nice as I have a closet full of macs that I need to recondition and donate. A Mac classic and a stylewriter would make a nice addition to a elementary school classroom.

[Turboladdade]

Sad to say I don't have much experience with educational or elementary software.

I barely knew what a computer was in the early 90s.

[RadiCalMan]

I don't know if you can get more simpler than Clarisworks for wordprocessing and it has the added advantage that the kids can easily expand into painting, graphics and even spreadsheets. They are all reasonably basic, but they provide all of the fundamentals if they eventually move up to more complex programs.

My son started to play with Clarisworks 3 & 4 on our old 660 AV when he was about 3-4 years old. He was a bit precocious and was already reading by then and he had so much fun when he discovered he could change the font size, styles and color of the words! When he started to type actual sentences, he had a ball when he discovered he could center justify and paste pictures into his documents. When he finally got into school, we had to convince him that he needed to tone down his style a bit for homework assignments!

In those days, I had to install At-Ease to keep him from coloring every icon and moving system files all over the place. He found out how to get past that when he was about 5! He's 17 now, but with OS X he has his own account and hasn't yet found a way to get administrator privileges, but not for lack of trying!

[Turboladdade]

Actually now that you mention it, the successor to ClarisWorks, AppleWorks 5, runs on 68k and PowerPC Macs running System 7 - Mac OS 9.

AppleWorks 6 requires a PowerPC and Mac OS 8.1, however.

[HarassmentPanda]

When I was a mere youngster I used to use The Writing Center! I think that program was published by The Learning Company, a development house that may have recognized my mother as a premier customer. I can't name a Learning Co. product I didn't own when I was a kid: the many iterations of Reader Rabbit, Math Blaster, etc.

While I don't remember The Writing Center very well, that may be a good sign--I would remember a really bad program. That said, by middle school I was comfortable using ClarisWorks and MS Word. As long as you hide some of the more complex toolbars, your child should have no problem using something like ClarisWorks or AppleWorks. Kids are eerily adept at using computers these days anyway.

Best of luck!

[helloimjoe]

I have The Writing Center on a disk for my performa... it is easy to use but would probably be for kids younger than what your thinking off... it has annoying music when it starts up and is probably more for kids in the 2nd 3rd grade range.

[helloimjoe]

Forgot to mention... if things like clipart are important, it has lot's of that, and if i'm remembering correctly it has easy tutorials for how to use it.