Support

Handwritten Journal is an iPad app for children who are learning to write. Your child says what happened today, the words appear on a ruled page, and they write over them in their own hand.

Common questions

The microphone isn't working.

Open the iPad's Settings › Privacy & Security › Microphone and check that Journal is switched on. The same goes for Speech Recognition, just below it. Without the microphone your child can still type their sentence with Type it instead and write it exactly the same way.

The words came out wrong.

Speech recognition on young voices is imperfect. The spoken words stay editable until they are written: tap the Abc tool on the writing page, then the word, and fix it. A misheard word never has to enter the journal.

Can more than one child use it?

Yes. Each child gets a profile with their own journal, typeface and size, and an optional four-digit PIN. A PIN keeps a sibling out; it is not encryption, and the app says so in Settings.

Where is our data?

On your iPad and nowhere else. There is no account and no server. Entries and profiles are deleted with the entry or the profile that holds them, and deleting the app removes everything. The privacy policy has the details.

How do I back up the journal?

Export it. From the journal, open any entry, tap Share, and choose Everything to get the whole book as one PDF; save it to Files or iCloud Drive. There is no cloud sync in this version, so an export now and then is the backup.

How do I print a page?

Open the entry, tap Share and export This entry as a PDF, then print it from the share sheet. The same sheet exports a month or everything.

My child's score dropped.

Check whether the typeface or size changed. Progress is tracked per setting for exactly this reason — a smaller letter is harder, and the Progress chart shows each setting separately, with a mark where the setting changed.

A card came up and my child couldn't close it.

That is the lesson. When a word is finished with a letter drawn out of order, the page teaches that one letter: it draws itself, and tracing it correctly closes the card. Watch again replays the arrows. It appears at most once per word.

Does it work with a finger, or on an iPhone?

A finger works — there is a switch for it in the child's profile — though an Apple Pencil or any iPad stylus is better. The app is iPad only, iOS 18 or later.

Still stuck?

Email hello@handwrittenjournal.app. It helps to say which iPad you have, which version of iPadOS it is running, and what you tapped just before the problem. Please do not send your child's journal or photos unless we ask for a specific page.