These Worksheets Follow the Japanese Curriculum — What That Means If You're Outside Japan
diglabo's worksheets are built to the curriculum of Japanese elementary schools — the national curriculum guidelines issued by Japan's Ministry of Education. They're published in five languages: Japanese, English, Chinese, Korean and Spanish.
If you're outside Japan, that's worth knowing before you print anything. Here's what it means in practice.
What's specifically Japanese about them
The order of topics and the grade each one lands in follow Japanese textbooks. Addition with carrying is taught in grade 1 by making "groups of 10". The times tables are chanted and memorised in grade 2. Decimals are introduced in grade 3, starting from "one tenth of a litre is 0.1 L".
Some of the methods are distinctly Japanese. The sakuranbo ("cherry") method for splitting numbers to make ten. The traditional chant used for the times tables. The way column arithmetic is laid out and where the borrowing marks go.
None of this is universal. Compared with many countries, the Japanese approach is fairly distinctive.
What differs between countries
If you're teaching from a different national curriculum, expect differences in at least these areas:
- The order and grade placement of topics. A topic taught in grade 4 in Japan may come a year earlier or later where you are, so a worksheet may include something your child hasn't met yet
- Units. These worksheets use the metric system throughout, including deciliters, which are used in Japanese schools but rarely elsewhere
- Notation and layout. How division and column arithmetic are written, and where remainders go, are not the same everywhere
- The wording of methods. Named techniques like the cherry method may not match what your child is shown at school
What's the same everywhere
A great deal of elementary math doesn't change at a border.
Numbers themselves. Addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Place value. The basics of shapes. Reading a clock. Fractions and decimals as ways of naming parts of a whole. The order of teaching and the notation differ, but the substance being taught is often identical.
Practice is practice. A child who needs a hundred more subtraction problems needs them in any curriculum.
So they're usable as they are
That's why I've published all five languages of the Japanese material rather than waiting until I could localise it.
What's translated is the problem text and the explanations; the problems themselves are shared. The same problem that appears on the Japanese worksheet prints in your language, laid out the same way.
If you're using these outside Japan, my suggestion is to pick by topic rather than by grade. Find the topic your child is working on now, and ignore the grade label attached to it.
What I'd like to do next
In time, I'd like to build material matched to the curricula of other countries. Different orderings mean problems that assume something not yet taught, and units and notation have their own local realities.
I can't yet say when, or which country first. When there's something to announce, it will appear here.
Switching language
Use the language switcher at the top right of the site (inside the menu on a phone). Switching changes the worksheets themselves, not just the interface — the whole-grade bundles download in whichever language you've selected.
This article is written by a parent who builds diglabo. I am not a teacher or an education specialist. The general guidance here is based on how the topic is taught in Japanese primary schools, checked against Japan's national curriculum guidelines.