The Dino Kids curriculum: learning paths and the standards behind them

Q: Is the math in Dino Kids aligned with Common Core?

Partly, and we say exactly where. More math draws on Common Core 1.OA.C.6 (adding and subtracting within 20 by making ten, doubles and near doubles), and Times Tables on 3.OA.A.1 (5 groups of 7) and 3.OA.C.7 (knowing all products of two one-digit numbers from memory by the end of grade 3). The first Math track and Thinking math are not mapped to any official standard, and nobody has certified the app against Common Core.

Q: Does Dino Kids teach phonics?

Vietnamese, yes: sounds, rimes and tones, following Vietnam's 2018 Grade 1 curriculum. English, no. The English cards teach letter names (“ay … apple”) and handwriting, because a synthetic voice cannot say isolated speech sounds reliably, and a wrong sound taught is worse than none. The first sound of each example word is where your child hears the letter's sound. For English phonics, use Dino Kids alongside a phonics programme rather than instead of one.

Q: Who writes the lessons, and how are they checked?

The project writes them itself: questions, explanations, word lists, example sentences and story retellings are original and released as CC0, not copied from textbooks or other apps. Every data set has an automatic checker that works each answer out again, checks spelling and readings, and is fed deliberately broken data to prove it catches mistakes. The checks run on our build servers before content reaches the app.

Dino Kids is not a bundle of separate games. Each subject is a path with an order, from age three to the end of elementary school in math, and up to the end of high school in Japanese kanji. This page sets out that order subject by subject, names the standard each one draws on where there is one, and says plainly where there is none.

Free
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No in-app purchases
No third-party analytics

416math lessons in 5 tracks, 7,883 exercises
2,141kanji in Levels 1–10
84drawing lessons in 10 levels
500folk tales in five languages

How the content is made

Teaching a child something wrong is worse than not teaching it at all, so every lesson goes through the same four steps before it reaches the app.

Written by the project

Questions, explanations, word lists, example sentences and story retellings are our own, released as CC0. Nothing is copied from textbooks, workbooks, dictionaries or other apps; the outside data we use, such as KanjiVG stroke data, carries its licence by name.

Every answer worked out again

Each data set has its own checker. For math, thinking puzzles, times tables and maze questions it recomputes every answer from scratch rather than trusting the answer field, and it checks that a “past ten” sum really crosses ten.

Spelling and readings checked

Vietnamese syllables are taken apart and rebuilt letter by letter; kana readings, pinyin and Korean spelling are checked against reference data. Each checker is also fed deliberately broken data to prove it catches mistakes.

Checked before release

The checks run on our build servers, so a broken lesson stops there instead of reaching your child. Lesson IDs never change when new lessons are added, so your child's progress is never lost.

Math: five tracks, age 3 to the end of elementary school

63 units, 416 lessons and 7,883 exercises. Nothing is locked by age or grade: a child moves on when the last step feels easy, and older children can start further along.

1. Math — 6 units, 49 lessons, ages about 3 to 5

Shapes: square, circle, triangle, rectangle.
Numbers 0 to 10: counting, recognising numerals, number rows.
Comparing: more, fewer, the same, then >, < and =.
Adding and taking away within 10, one small step at a time.
Putting it all together, then Extra practice.

Based on: the lesson plans of a Vietnamese school-readiness class, rewritten in our own words. It is not mapped to an official standard. Design: every sum has objects to count under it; wrong choices are the neighbouring numbers (answer 4, choices 3 and 5), because far-off numbers can be guessed without learning; every number can be tapped to hear it.

2. Thinking math › Basics — 7 units, 40 lessons, ages about 3 to 6

Patterns → Sorting → Position and space.
Sizes → Order and thinking.
Big challenge, then Extra practice.

Based on: ideas common to early-childhood education (patterns, sorting, position, comparing, sequence); no official standard. Design: each unit runs Learn → Practice levels 1, 2, 3 → Quiz. Quiz questions are never reused from practice. A missed quiz still counts as done — a child is never held back by a score.

3. Thinking math › Challenge — 29 units, 198 lessons

The puzzle and word-problem types of elementary school, from easy to hard: shape and color patterns, standing in line, counting shapes, Venn diagrams, picture graphs, telling the time, matchsticks, balance scales, planting trees, age puzzles, working backward, one part first, fractions, sum and difference, averages, place value and dividing, hens and rabbits, too many and too few, speed and distance, “who has what” logic, problems in several steps.

Based on: the list of problem types found in elementary “thinking math” collections — only the names of the types, never their questions. No grade is shown anywhere, and units do not lock each other. Design: “I do, we do, you do”: a worked example cut into steps, then three practice lessons where the How to box fades (always shown, then after one wrong answer, then only after answering). The quiz bank is large enough for eight attempts without a repeated question, the right answer is not guessable from its position, and wrong choices are children's typical slips — counting one too many, stopping a step early.

4. More math — 10 units, 61 lessons

Numbers to 20 → Easy sums to 20.
Adding past 10 → Taking away past 10, by making ten: 8 + 5 = 8 + 2 + 3.
Numbers to 100: tens and ones.
Two-digit sums without regrouping → with regrouping, including column sums.
Quick math → Big challenge → Extra practice.

Based on: Common Core 1.OA.C.6 (adding and subtracting within 20 by making ten, doubles and near doubles, thinking of subtraction as an unknown addend) and Singapore's number bonds, moving from objects to pictures to symbols; the Grade 1–2 goals of Vietnam's 2018 math curriculum; and Japan's Grade 1 method of splitting a number to make ten. Crossing ten comes before numbers to 100, as in Japan and Singapore, because every sum with regrouping rests on it. Design: ten frames, tens rods and number-bond diagrams at level 1, the bare sum at level 3; your child fills in each step, not just the answer; wrong choices are real mistakes such as 38 + 25 = 53 (forgetting to regroup) or 52 − 17 = 45 (taking the smaller ones digit from the bigger).

5. Times Tables — 11 units, 68 lessons

Around age 5: equal groups → counting by 2s, 5s and 10s → times is adding again → the 2 table → the 5 and 10 tables.
Ages 5–6: swapping and arrays → the 3 and 4 tables.
Ages 6–7 and up: the 9 and 1 tables, and 0 → the 6, 7 and 8 tables (only six new facts left) → Know them all → Extra practice.

Based on: Common Core 3.OA.A.1 (“5 groups of 7”) and 3.OA.C.7 (knowing all products of two one-digit numbers from memory by the end of grade 3); England's expectation of every table to 12 × 12 by the end of Year 4, checked by the Multiplication Tables Check; the easiest-first order used in Singapore and England; and research on retrieval practice, spacing and interleaving. The app stops at 10 × 10, so a child in England still has the 11 and 12 tables to learn. Design: understanding before memorising; the chant read in the way each country says it (“7 times 8 is 56” in English); every fact reviewed after 0, 1, 3, 7 and 14 days in the Times garden, where plants never wilt; speed measured quietly, with no timer on screen. The report never compares your child with a table they “should” know.

More about math → · Times tables chart 1 to 10 →

Letters, reading and English

What the app does for early reading, and — just as important — what it does not.

English alphabet: 26 cards, Aa to Zz. A tap says the letter's name, then an example word with a picture: “ay … apple”. Counting cards from 0 to 20 stop at 20, because from 21 on numbers follow a rule that belongs to a later stage.
No English phonics. A synthetic voice cannot say isolated speech sounds reliably, and a wrong sound taught is worse than none. So the app teaches letter names and letter shapes, and the first sound of each example word is where your child hears the letter's sound. It is a companion to a phonics programme, not a replacement. No English standard such as CEFR is claimed.
Handwriting order: capitals before small letters, easiest movements first — I L T E F H → A V W X Y K M N Z → C O S G U J → B D P R Q → small letters, starting with o, c, e and l.
Marked stroke by stroke for coverage, accuracy and direction, with a wider margin for a three-year-old than for a five-year-old. When a stroke will not come, help grows step by step: the arrow replays, a hand traces the model, the margin quietly widens, then “Let's do it together”. No “wrong”, no red, no limit on tries, and at least one star.
Read-along stories: 100 English and American folk tales (and 100 in each of four other languages), the sentence being read lighting up so a child follows the words with the voice. Plots are public-domain folk tales; the wording is our own retelling, 15–45 short sentences, two to five minutes, with the violence of the originals softened.
Word cards: 999 words in 26 everyday topics, in five languages. There is no standard word list behind them; instead, a native speaker separate from the writer checked every word in each language with one question: would an adult say this word to a three-year-old? Review shows the picture alone, so your child recalls the word before seeing it.

For bilingual families, Vietnamese has full phonics: sounds → rimes → joining a first sound, a rime and a tone → words, following Vietnam's 2018 Grade 1 Vietnamese curriculum (40 sounds, 6 tones, 145 rimes, 609 syllables). Vietnamese letters are written to the national school letterforms of Decision 31/2002 of the Ministry of Education.

More about letters and tracing → · Read the folk tales → · See the word cards →

Japanese, Korean and Chinese

Kana: 104 hiragana and 46 katakana, in gojūon order (あ row to わ row), hiragana first, as Japanese children learn them. Stroke data comes from KanjiVG (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Kanji Levels 1–10: all 2,141 jōyō kanji, the official list of everyday characters in Japan. Levels follow Japanese school years: Levels 1–6 are grades 1–6 (Level 1 is the 80 kanji of grade 1), Levels 7–8 junior high and Levels 9–10 high school. Within a level, common and simpler characters come first.
Kanji design: 4,239 example words, each chosen for a particular reading; example sentences at low levels use only kanji already learned; mock tests follow each level's exam structure, with stroke order and stroke counts at Levels 1–6 and radicals from Level 4; wrong choices are the kanji's own other readings. Written answers are checked for shape, stroke count and stroke order. A level opens only when its meanings are complete in all five languages.
JLPT N5–N1: a starter set of 387 words and 81 grammar patterns in 21 topics. The N5–N1 labels only sort items by difficulty; the app is not connected with the test's organisers, and the lists are our own rather than copies of circulating JLPT lists.
Korean: 40 Hangul letters in five groups, consonants before vowels; standard South Korean letter names (기역, 디귿, 시옷); Revised Romanization of 2000 for the adult; Sino-Korean numbers 1–20.
Chinese: 39 first characters in four groups, numbers first; stroke order to the mainland standard 《现代汉语通用字笔顺规范》, pinyin to 《现代汉语词典》; Chinese stories use only characters from the 2013 Table of General Standard Chinese Characters.

More about languages → · Look up 2,141 kanji →

Art: coloring, Learn to draw, Advanced drawing

Drawing is the subject with the most detailed references: every one of the 21 ideas in Learn to draw records the source it comes from.

Learn to draw — 52 lessons in 6 levels

Level 1 (about age 3) and Level 2 (4): shapes and lines — circles, straight lines, squares, curves, shapes that build things.
Level 3 (5) and Level 4 (6): building a picture — pointed shapes, symmetry, sizes that fit, tilted shapes that seem to move.
Level 5 (7–8) and Level 6 (9 and up): principles, then space and composition — outline, texture, rhythm, far is small and near is big.

Based on: England's National Curriculum for art and design (Key Stage 1); the elements and principles of art as set out by the Getty education programme, and California's visual arts standards; Japan's Course of Study for arts and crafts; Vietnam's preschool programme and 2018 art curriculum; Lowenfeld and Brittain's stages of drawing development; and shape-copying milestones that match the Beery VMI (circle around 3, cross around 4, square around 4½, triangle around 5). Method: directed drawing and Monart's “shape alphabet”. This is our own reference work; nobody has certified it. Design: three kinds of help on the same lesson — Trace, Follow dots, On my own; one new thing per lesson; every step names a shape, not a body part (“a big circle for the head”); try it first, name it afterwards; no perspective or cast shadows before Level 7; no marks for stroke order or direction.

Advanced drawing — 32 lessons in Levels 7–10

Level 7, form (about 10–11) → Level 8, light and shade (12+).
Level 9, perspective (12–13): eye level before vanishing points, one point before two.
Level 10, figures (14+): gesture, stick figure, solid shapes, measuring with the head.

Based on: Vietnam's 2018 art curriculum for grades 7 and 9 (light source; proportion true to the model), China's 2022 art curriculum (one-point perspective in grades 3–5), Ontario's arts curriculum, and research on how children draw solid shapes (Toomela, 2003). Ages are suggestions and nothing is locked. Not taught: nudes, muscle anatomy, “ideal” proportions, three-point perspective, copying real people or copyrighted characters.

Coloring — over 300 pictures in 15 themes

There is no teaching standard for coloring, so it follows design rules for a three-year-old's finger: thick, closed outlines and few, large areas, picked in that order; the paint bucket fills when the finger lifts, so a resting finger never spills paint; a 12-color palette with no two colors too alike and real skin tones; color is never used to signal right or wrong, for children who are color blind.

More about Learn to draw → · More about coloring →

Music: piano from zero

Meet the piano: touch to play, groups of two and three black keys, high and low, finding C. Only one finger is needed.
Five fingers → Beat and rhythm (ta, ti-ti).
Three-note songs → All five fingers (three-note chords).
Moving hands: the full octave and the octave below.

27 lessons in 6 stages, plus 94 songs in five grades of difficulty. Based on: the teaching order shared by most piano methods (black-key groups → finding C → finger numbers → rhythm → three notes → five notes → chords); the exercises themselves are our own, not those of any published method. Every song is a public-domain melody, checked song by song, with its origin shown under the title. Design: every key sounds, even a wrong one; after two wrong presses the app shows the key; songs and free play sit outside the path, because for a three-year-old a piano is a toy before it is a lesson.

More about piano →

Thinking games in Playtime

Mazes: 120 day mazes on every device, growing from a 3 × 3 grid, plus 30 larger ones on iPad. Every maze has exactly one way out, proved by a solver before release. After level 20, difficulty grows through longer paths, more junctions and deeper wrong turns, not smaller squares.
Night maze: another 120 mazes (30 more on iPad), never the same as a day maze. Only Dino's torch lights the way, so the path has to be remembered.
Night maze challenge: each dead end asks a three-choice question — math by default, or one of the five languages, or switched off, chosen by a parent for each child. Ten levels; ten right in a row moves up, three wrong in a row moves down one. Levels 1 and 2 work for a child who cannot read yet.
Join the numbers: 100 pictures from 0–10 up to 0–200, each number read aloud as it is joined, so counting comes with the game.
Flip cards: 100 levels over 193 national flags, harder through more cards and through flags that look alike.

These games are built on design rules, not a teaching standard. They open with tickets earned in lessons, each round ends on its own, and stickers arrive in a fixed order — no random prize boxes. More about Playtime →

Rules that hold in every subject

There is no upper age, but the youngest child sets the rules.

Buttons sized for a three-year-old's finger: 88 pt on iPad, 64 pt on iPhone, and never below 52 pt on the smallest phones. A finger resting on the glass while the other hand works is never mistaken for a gesture.
Never zero stars. Stars not yet earned are drawn as outlines. No ✗, no red, no countdown. After a few tries the app shows the way or does the step, then moves on.
A child who cannot read yet can play alone: every question is read aloud, and every card speaks when tapped.
Nothing is locked by a score. “A greyed-out tile produces tears, not a habit.”
Practice where it is needed: “Three things today” usually starts with the letter your child gets wrong most.
A 7-day report for you: minutes, days, a comparison with the week before and three letters to practise — worked out on the device, behind the parental gate, one child at a time.
Screen time: daily limits for weekdays and weekends and a bedtime, per child, off by default. When signed in, the limit counts time across all your devices. Near the end the screen turns a warm yellow instead of showing a countdown, and nothing in progress is lost.

Safety and copyright

No advertising, no in-app purchases, no third-party analytics, no external links in the children's area; settings sit behind a parental gate.
Content made by the project, licences traceable: KanjiVG (CC BY-SA 3.0), Kanjium and KANJIDIC2 (CC BY-SA 4.0), flag-icons (MIT), SIL Open Font Licence fonts. When we cannot be sure of a source, we leave it out; content from sources that did not allow redistribution has been removed.
Age-appropriate: folk tales are retold with the violence softened; pictures carry no brands or copyrighted characters. The story illustrations, drawing models, word-card pictures and icons are made with AI image tools and chosen by the project, and the app credits them as such.

Full licence list: Open-source licences.

Questions parents ask

Is the math in Dino Kids aligned with Common Core?

Partly, and we say exactly where. More math draws on Common Core 1.OA.C.6 (adding and subtracting within 20 by making ten, doubles and near doubles), and Times Tables on 3.OA.A.1 (5 groups of 7) and 3.OA.C.7 (knowing all products of two one-digit numbers from memory by the end of grade 3). The first Math track and Thinking math are not mapped to any official standard, and nobody has certified the app against Common Core.

Does Dino Kids teach phonics?

Vietnamese, yes: sounds, rimes and tones, following Vietnam's 2018 Grade 1 curriculum. English, no. The English cards teach letter names (“ay … apple”) and handwriting, because a synthetic voice cannot say isolated speech sounds reliably, and a wrong sound taught is worse than none. The first sound of each example word is where your child hears the letter's sound. For English phonics, use Dino Kids alongside a phonics programme rather than instead of one.

Who writes the lessons, and how are they checked?

The project writes them itself: questions, explanations, word lists, example sentences and story retellings are original and released as CC0, not copied from textbooks or other apps. Every data set has an automatic checker that works each answer out again, checks spelling and readings, and is fed deliberately broken data to prove it catches mistakes. The checks run on our build servers before content reaches the app.

Each subject in detail

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