Playwrite NG Modern Guides

Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba and English are the 4 languages most widely spoken in Nigeria, and under them sit hundreds of regional languages and dialects. Nigerian education puts weight on teaching children in the language they hear every day, which means training and classroom material have to be produced many times over, on limited money. Handwriting slides down that list. Some private schools buy in a foreign model such as Nelson Handwriting, while in public schools children mostly end up copying whatever hand their parents and teachers write.

Playwrite NG Modern Guides is the companion to Playwrite NG Modern, with the writing lines drawn into the letters themselves: baseline, x-height, ascenders and descenders. Veronika Burian and José Scaglione made it at TypeTogether for Playwrite, the school font project that comes out of Primarium and its survey of how primary schools around the world teach handwriting.

For a practice sheet, type underscores. Here the underscore prints the empty guidelines and nothing else, at the width of a word space, so a row of them gives a child a blank line to fill.

In Word you may have to switch on Contextual Alternates before the OpenType features that shape the writing take effect. Leave the Bold and Italic buttons alone too, there is only the Regular.