Sakuragaoka Elementary School, Moriguchi City, Osaka Prefecture, Japan

Abstract: In accordance with the Japanese Elementary School Course of Study (Reiwa Edition) issued by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), primary mathematics education establishes three core literacy pillars: knowledge and skills, thinking, judgment and expression, and learning attitudes and human cultivation. The curriculum clearly advocates that arithmetic teaching should move beyond mechanical computational training and foster students’ mathematical thinking and problem-solving abilities through authentic life-based mathematical activities. Nevertheless, traditional instructional designs in current Japanese primary mathematics education present prominent drawbacks. Life-themed materials are formally applied merely as superficial exercise backgrounds without forming in-depth logical connections with mathematical principles; teaching designs are result-oriented and neglect the procedural cultivation of students’ mathematical verbal expression and thinking construction; standardized unified teaching fails to accommodate diverse academic levels in public primary schools, making personalized teaching difficult to implement and unable to fully meet the literacy requirements of the new curriculum standards. Taking the fourth-grade unit Addition and Subtraction of Decimals as the core instructional carrier, this paper innovatively constructs a four-dimensional teaching system integrating life-based theme deconstruction, hierarchical progressive tasks, refined verbal cultivation, and closed-loop literacy evaluation. Adopting no intelligent teaching equipment and relying solely on localized Japanese campus life materials, this study forms a practical and replicable instructional paradigm, providing theoretical references and implementable strategies for optimizing literacy-oriented teaching design, popularizing differentiated instruction, and systematizing mathematical verbal cultivation in Japanese primary mathematics education.

Keywords: Japanese primary mathematics; arithmetic teaching design; literacy-oriented education; life-based teaching; hierarchical tasks; mathematical verbal cultivation