We've started kanji worksheets

After the math worksheets, we've started kanji worksheets. They cover the 1,026 kanji taught in Japanese primary school, grouped three or four at a time in the order they appear in the textbook. From grade 1 to grade 6, there are 339 sheets in all.

What's on each sheet

Each sheet is one A4 page. It has writing practice for the kanji in that set, plus questions on compound words, okurigana and readings. There's a question PDF and an answer PDF, so once your child has solved the sheet, you can check it against the answers.

The list of ready-made worksheets is arranged by grade, so you can work through it from the top. Each kanji appears on just one sheet within its grade. The same kanji never spreads across several sheets.

About the order

The order follows where each new kanji first appears in the Mitsumura Tosho textbooks. I based it on a published cross-reference table.

If your child's school uses a textbook from another publisher, the order will shift a little. In Japan, though, which kanji are taught in which grade is set by the grade-by-grade kanji list in the national curriculum guidelines, and it doesn't change with the publisher. Work through a grade's worksheets to the end, and every kanji for that grade comes up exactly once.

Something I caught while building it

The squares for practicing a kanji come with an example word that uses it. Those example words carry furigana, the small characters that show how to read them.

Partway through, I noticed something I'd overlooked. An example word could be exactly the same word that a reading question on the same sheet asks about. With the furigana attached, the answer was printed right there on the sheet. Left as it was, about 6 in 10 reading questions would have had their answer on the same page. A sheet you could finish by copying.

Now, any word whose reading is asked on a sheet is left out of that sheet's practice examples.

Build your own by choosing the kanji

Besides the ready-made worksheets, you can also choose the kanji you want to practice and build your own worksheet. Pick a grade, choose three to six kanji, check the preview, and download it. It's handy when you want one sheet with just the kanji your child tends to get wrong.

What comes next

For now, the kanji worksheets are only available on the Japanese pages. They can't be graded with the camera yet, the way the math worksheets can.

I started building diglabo because I saw my daughter getting stressed by all sorts of learning materials. With kanji too, I'll keep looking for a shape that's easy to keep going with. If anything bothers you when you use them, please tell me through the contact form.