Teacher’s manual · Chapter 1 of 12
Start here
Everyone · about 4 minutes
Skhillz Script teaches children to write cursive by hand, on a screen, one movement at a time. It is not a worksheet that has been photographed and put online. The program shows a child how a letter is made, watches them trace it, then watches them write it unaided and scores what they produced.
This manual is for the adult side of that. It assumes nothing about your technical background and everything about your teaching one.
What you need
- A device for each child, or a shared set. A tablet with a stylus is best, a laptop with a trackpad works, a mouse works poorly.
- A current browser. Chrome, Edge, Safari and Firefox are all fine.
- An internet connection to sign in and to save work. Practice itself keeps running if the connection drops, and the work goes up when it returns.
- An active license on your school. Without one, students cannot sign in. You can still set up classes and import your roster while you wait.
The two doors
There are two completely separate ways into Skhillz Script, and mixing them up is the most common early confusion.
| At school | At home | |
|---|---|---|
| Who signs in | Teacher, with an email and password | Parent, with an email and password |
| How the child gets in | A login code on a card, at skhillzscript.com/student | The parent picks the child from the family page |
| Who sees the work | The teacher, and administrators above them | The parent only |
| Who pays | The school or district | The parent |
They do not connect. A school never sees a child's home account, and a parent never sees the school's. This is deliberate and it is written into the database rules, not just the screens. If a child uses the program at home as well as at school, those are two separate records of practice.
The first twenty minutes
- Sign in at skhillzscript.com/signin with the email your administrator invited. If nobody has invited you yet, see Administrator setup.
- Open your classroom. Create one class. Give it a period and a school year. See Setting up your classes.
- Import your roster from a spreadsheet. You will get back a login code for every child. See Adding students.
- Print the codes and cut them into cards.
- Before the children touch it, sit down and do one letter yourself, all the way through. Watch the demonstration, trace it, write it, look at the score. Ten minutes here saves an hour of questions later.
How to use this manual
Chapters are in reading order and each one stands alone. If you are looking for a specific problem rather than reading through, go straight to When something goes wrong, which is organized by what you are seeing rather than by what caused it.
Every chapter prints cleanly. If your school wants a paper copy in the staff room, open a chapter and use your browser's print command.
Not covered here? Write to support@skhillzacademy.org, or use the support page, which tells you what to include so nobody has to write twice.