At that time, I was also subscribed to a monthly extracurricular learning program for primary schoolers called 進研ゼミ小学講座 (Shinkenzemi Shougaku-kouza)
It was quite popular then, and it still is one of the best-known programs of domestic education.
Basically, they send you textbooks and learning materials once a month for you to study at home.
The textbooks are very friendly designed, with a lot of drawings and mangas.
At that time, they were accompanied by cassettes and CDs, even VHS videos (remember, millions of years ago🦕).
Sometimes, I was provided with cool tools for scientific experiments.
I could also take tests, which were attached to the textbooks, and sent them to the teachers of Shinkenzemi by mail (🐌snail mail🐌, mind you🦕).
They would send me back the results with all the corrections and encouraging comments from the teachers.
They also gave the students stickers for taking the tests.
The rule was like, you got golden stickers if you did well in the tests, and silver if you did so-so, and not shiny ones if you did poorly, if I remember it correctly.
If you accumulated these stickers, you could exchange them with other cool educational toys and tools as your prize.
I don’t remember what I got, but I remember being obsessed about having gotten one of the prizes.
This extracurricular course was pretty fun.
It provided extra help to get through primary school materials, but I'd like to point out here that it also gave me extra education that schools did not necessarily give: English education.
To be continued...
(The picture is from a review article of the Shinkenzemi, just to give you some idea of what the materials are like nowadays)
(To tell you the truth, I could not find any decent picture of the materials of my era, because they're too ancient to be recorded digitally🦕)
✔Corrected
Wow, crazy! Fascinating what kind of programs existed. To have the internet nowadays is really a blessing for learning languages. I sometimes think we forget about the old times, when everything was more difficult. On the other hand, today we have an overload of information. So probably the challenges have just shifted :D.
Thanks for the comment @Dustin. Now we are blessed with a lot of information and options but like you said, it can be overwhelming. We tend to spend too much time looking for "right" materials or end up having too many things on our plate.