Japanese Workbooks

In one of Kat's posts, entitled I Want One!, she mentioned a learning book her Chinese neighbor has for practicing to write the Chinese characters. In Japanese these are called 漢字練習帳 or kanji workbooks. Some common examples can be seen here; they're a bit like graphing notebooks.

More like the one Kat describes, there are also workbooks that act as teaching guides: showing the student how to write kanji and teaching them how to pronounce each kanji. For example this book featuring the popular children's character Doraemon, teaches all of the 1006 教育漢字, education/elementary level kanji. (There is also an equivalent for hiragana and katakana here.) However, this book is unusual because not many books that address all 1006 elementary level kanji. Rather you'll find a series of books that have separate volumes for each grade level.

These books are usually used in tandem with school or help from parents and one wouldn't normally rely on them for all of their learning needs. That makes finding a complete course for native Japanese speakers difficult to find. The blogger Maki, from Hungry for (mostly Japanese) Words, talks about "a correspondence course for overseas Japanese kids". It would be interesting to own a course like this but I haven't stumbled across one yet.