Playwrite TZ Guides

Tanzania’s primary school curriculum was last updated in 2015 by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology together with the Tanzania Institute of Education, and the syllabus that goes with it says children should learn print letters first and cursive after. It stops there, though. It shows no model letters at all. What happens in classrooms is that Standard 1 pupils learn an almost upright precursive and move to fully joined cursive from Standard 2 on, working from primers in the free online libraries.

Playwrite Tanzania is TypeTogether’s font of that model, and this Guides version adds the lines a child writes between. Every letter carries its 4 guides, baseline and x-height, ascender and descender, so a pupil can see how tall each part should be and copy it with some confidence.

The underscore trick. In the Guides fonts the underscore prints only the guidelines, at the width of a normal word space. Type a row of them and you get empty ruled lines for practice, no letters, which is the part of the font a teacher will probably use most.

Veronika Burian and José Scaglione designed it for Playwrite, a series that rests on Primarium’s record of school handwriting in many countries. There is 1 Regular weight, so leave the B and I buttons alone; a word processor would only fake them. In Word, switch on contextual alternates so the letters join as they should.