Playwrite IS Guides

By the end of 4th grade, Iceland’s 2014 national curriculum expects a child to write every letter clearly enough to be understood. The actual teaching is packed into grades 1 to 3, ages 6 to 9, and the MMS schoolbooks walk pupils through a simplified modern italic in stages. Lowercase Grunnskrift comes first: plain, unjoined letters with a slight slant and a little exit stroke. Capitals in the same model follow. Then in 3rd grade come the joined letters, Tengiskrift.

This font is the guided version of Playwrite Ísland, the TypeTogether font that follows that model. Every character carries rules for the baseline, the x-height and the ascender and descender lines, so a child copying a word sees where each stroke should start and stop. Teachers get 1 extra tool. Type underscores and you get the rules with no letters on them, each the width of a word space, which is how you make an empty practice line.

How would we use it? Print a word in Playwrite IS Guides at the top of a sheet, then a row of underscores below for the copying. Veronika Burian and José Scaglione drew the Playwrite fonts from Primarium research into school handwriting worldwide, and the Guides cut came to Google Fonts in November 2024 as a single Regular, with the letter joins handled by contextual alternates.