MATATAG learning areas — research dossier

Everything this repository knows about the seven learning areas it has not built: Filipino, English, Science, Araling Panlipunan, EPP, MAPEH and GMRC — together with the four areas that carry the same content under different names in other grades (Language, Reading and Literacy, Makabansa, TLE, Values Education).

This document exists to make the next build mechanical rather than exploratory. It is written to be read in one pass by whoever builds the next learning area, and to be read again by a program: the same facts are held in machine-readable form at data/learning-areas.json.

Read §1 before acting on anything here. One of the seven guides has since been obtained — Science is written from the document and is safe to build on. The other six are a map of the territory, not the territory.

1. The access ceiling

The Mathematics curriculum guide is in this repository — committed at docs/research/source/ — because it was uploaded directly into a session. That is still the only route that works.

Every other route is closed. The network egress proxy refuses the CONNECT before TLS is negotiated, for every host that carries these documents:

$ curl -sS https://www.deped.gov.ph/
curl: (56) CONNECT tunnel failed, response 403

WebFetch returns EGRESS_BLOCKED for deped.gov.ph, depedclub.com, studylib.net, teachpinas.com, matatagcurriculum.com and matatagcurriculum.ph. Six document hosts were tried; all six refused. Not one of the seven curriculum guides could be opened from here.

✅ The Science guide has since been obtained — by upload, the one route that works. It is committed at source/ and §10.4 is written from it rather than about it. That section is Tier A; the other six areas are not. The upload route remains the only one, and it needs a human.

Web search runs server-side and is unaffected. So this dossier is built from search results — and this repository has already been burned once doing exactly that. An earlier Grade 1–10 Mathematics spine assembled from search summaries was wrong in seven of ten rows, and was only corrected by reading the actual PDF (ARTIFACT-SPEC.md §6).

That history sets the rule for this document:

Nothing here is a substitute for the curriculum guide. Where this dossier states a content or competency claim, it is a lead to verify, not a fact to build on. Where it states a structural claim — which areas exist in which grades, which document to obtain, how a grade is computed — it is more reliable, because those facts are reproduced consistently across many independent sources and are recorded here with their tier.

Confidence tiers, used throughout

Only Tier A is safe to build on without further checking. Everything at Tier C is the same class of evidence that produced the seven wrong rows.

2. What is Tier A — the curriculum-wide organisers

The Mathematics CG is a Mathematics document, but parts of it describe the whole MATATAG curriculum. Those parts are Tier A for every learning area, and they are the firmest ground in this dossier.

The eight curriculum organizers

From the Mathematics CG, page 70, Curriculum Organization. The CG states these definitions are "drawn from DepEd Order No. 8, s. 2015 and DepEd Order No. 21, s. 2019" — they are DepEd-wide policy vocabulary, not Mathematics-specific. Every MATATAG curriculum guide is assembled from these same eight parts, which is why one artifact template can serve any learning area.

✅ This is now proven rather than inferred. When it was first written it rested on a single document, and a reasonable reader could have objected that a Mathematics guide is not evidence about anyone else's. The Science guide carries the same glossary — the same eight organizers, the same two DepEd Orders cited, wording near-identical. Two independent curriculum guides, written by different teams, assembled from the same eight parts.

Why this matters for reuse. A new learning area does not need a new document structure. It needs its own values for these eight organizers. The syllabus template already has a slot for each one — see NEW-LEARNING-AREA.md.

Other learning areas, named inside the Mathematics CG

These are Tier A statements about other areas, made by an official DepEd curriculum document.

• EPP / TLE, full official name — "Edukasyong Pantahanan at Pangkabuhayan (EPP) / Technology and Livelihood Education (TLE)", and "Mensuration and calculation are core competencies" there (p. 11).

• "The Languages learning areas" is a named plural grouping in DepEd usage (p. 11), which is why Filipino and English share standards vocabulary.

• The STEM framework spans three learning areas — "Science, Mathematics, and Technology and Livelihood Education (TLE), which may collectively employ the Engineering Design Process (EDP)" (p. 13). TLE is a STEM subject in DepEd's own framing, not a vocational annexe.

• DepEd's own model of a cross-area task (p. 15), quoted in full because it is the clearest official statement of how these areas are meant to interlock:

  "Developing a healthy menu plan for a week may be primarily in Health or Science, may include Mathematics on the computation of a budget for the daily meal, English for the written presentation of the menu, and Arts for the visual presentation of the menu."

  Note that this names Health and Arts as separately identifiable — consistent with the MAPEH split described in §5.

• Financial literacy is a cross-area mandate — DO 22, s. 2021 "reiterates the need to integrate financial concepts across learning areas at different levels" (p. 14).

3. The coverage matrix

Which learning area exists in which grade. This corrects the table currently in matatag-brief.md §2, which groups Grades 1 and 2 together — see §9.

Read down a column to see a grade's full timetable; read across a row to see an area's span.

The four handovers. Each is a point where one area stops and another picks up the same developmental thread. A build that covers Grades 1–10 must cross all four.

Mathematics is still the only learning area present in all ten grades — the scope decision in ARTIFACT-SPEC.md §1 stands, and this matrix is the evidence for it. GMRC/Values Education is the only other strand spanning 1–10, and it does so under two names.

4. Grade 1 and Grade 2 are not the same timetable

Worth stating separately because the repository currently gets it wrong, and because it is the single most load-bearing structural correction in this dossier.

Sources describe the transition in developmental terms: Language develops "oral language skills for communication in the learner's first language" and Reading and Literacy develops "foundational reading skills", and together they "help learners to transition to the language of schooling" — i.e. to Filipino and English as named subjects from Grade 2. Tier B.

Independent corroboration comes from the document titles themselves, which encode their own grade ranges: FINAL MATATAG LANGUAGE CG 2023 Grade 1 and FINAL MATATAG Reading and Literacy CG 2023 G1 are Grade 1 documents, while FINAL MATATAG FILIPINO CG 2023 Grades 2-10 and FINAL MATATAG English CG 2023 Grades 2-10 start at Grade 2.

5. The document shopping list

This is the actionable part of this dossier. Every item is a file to download on an unrestricted machine and attach to a session. Attaching one moves an entire learning area from Tier C to Tier A in a single step.

Canonical source — the DepEd LR Portal, Revised K-10 LMs: https://sites.google.com/deped.gov.ph/deped-lrportal/revised-k-10-lms

A direct URL for every document below is recorded in data/learning-areas.json under documents.wanted[].urls. Not one of them was opened — every host refuses this environment's proxy — so they are leads from search results, not verified links.

Two traps, either of which hands you the wrong file:

1. Several areas were published twice. First a rollout slice covering only the first-wave grades — Grades 4 and 7, or Grades 1, 4 and 7 — and later the full range. MATATAG-Science-CG-Grade-4-and-7.pdf is not the Grades 3–10 document, and it sits on deped.gov.ph looking entirely official. Check the grade range in the title.
2. Mirrors rename files. Some carry a numeric prefix such as 13-; some use spaces where others use hyphens or underscores. Search on the title rather than pasting a path.

Held ✅

Wanted

Eleven documents covered the seven areas — not seven. Two areas are bundled with their successors (EPP/TLE; GMRC/VE), one area is split across two documents (MAPEH), and the Grade 1 language provision needs two more. One is now held; ten remain.

The General Shaping Paper deserves special mention. It is the document behind all the others and would answer the cross-area questions this dossier has to leave at Tier C — the coverage matrix, the time allotment table, the framework common to every area. If only one document can be obtained, and the goal is structure rather than one area's competencies, get the Shaping Paper. If the goal is to build a specific area, get that area's CG.

Priority reasoning. Science first: it spans eight grades, has stable content domains, and is the best fit for the existing artifact template. English and Filipino next: nine grades each, and they unlock the Grade 2–3 language question. MAPEH is last of the substantive areas because it needs two documents and breaks the template hardest.

6. Assessment weights, by learning area

The weights are not uniform across learning areas. This repository currently applies 20/50/30 everywhere in Grades 4–10, which is correct for five of the seven areas here and wrong for two.

Under DepEd Order No. 015, s. 2026, Grades 4–10:

Within the Examinations component, the reported split is Summative Test 1 30%, Summative Test 2 30%, Term Examination 40%. Tier C.

Why this is more credible than a bare Tier C. The shape matches long-standing DepEd practice under DO 8, s. 2015, where MAPEH and EPP/TLE were also the performance-weighted exception. A finding that continues an established pattern is likelier than one that breaks it — but it is still a search summary, and the note in README.md already flags that this repository's 20/50/30 is attributed to Key Stage 2 core learning areas. Six of the seven areas in this dossier were never inside that attribution. Confirm against DO 015 before building EPP/TLE or MAPEH.

Key Stage 1 is descriptive. DO 015, s. 2026 is reported to implement descriptive grading with narrative feedback for Kindergarten through Grade 3, with numerical grading retained for Key Stages 2–4. This repository currently treats only Grade 1 as descriptive. See §9.

7. Time allotment — and the four-day week

Under DepEd Order No. 12, s. 2024, schools may adopt uniform allotments of 50, 55 or 60 minutes per learning area. Under that flexible option the days per week differ by learning area:

Baseline allotment without the flexible option is 45 minutes daily, five days a week; Grades 1–3 range from 40 to 45 minutes. Tier C.

This breaks a template assumption. Every lesson plan in this repository is a five-day week — the ILAW weekly plan has five days in it, and the syllabi map 33 five-day weeks. For Filipino, Araling Panlipunan, EPP/TLE and MAPEH under the flexible option, that is one day too many. A four-day ILAW plan is not a cosmetic change: it redistributes the whole week's teaching, and the assessment day has to move.

This is the clearest example of why the seven remaining areas cannot simply reuse the Mathematics artifacts with the words swapped.

8. Language

The rule this repository enforces — one language per artifact, never mixed — interacts with each area differently, and for the language subjects it becomes genuinely subtle.

The medium of instruction is a property of the learning area, not only of the key stage

This is now confirmed, not merely suspected. The EPP/TLE guide states its own medium: Filipino for Grades 4–5, English from Grade 6 to Grade 10 — corroborated by every Grade 4 and 5 EPP classroom material found, all of them Filipino-titled. Tier B.

ARTIFACT-SPEC.md §5 gives the rule as "Grades 4–10 → English, wholly", justified as "English is the medium of instruction for Mathematics from Grade 4." That scoping is correct and the rule is right for Mathematics — but it does not generalise. A Grade 4 EPP artifact in English would be as wrong as a Grade 4 Mathematics artifact in Filipino, and the Grade 6 boundary is a real line inside a single learning area.

So the language rule needs one more axis before the next area is built: language is a function of (area, grade), not of grade alone. Derive the locale from that pair and enforce it at build time, exactly as the key-stage rule is enforced now.

One more thing that will trip the linter: English technical terms stay English inside Filipino EPP text — mouse, keyboard, browser, email, desktop publishing. This is standard DepEd register and the same category as barangay and jeepney in the existing rule, but the allow-list has to be told or it will flag every Grade 4 Quarter 1 slide.

Three further complications the Mathematics build never met.

1. Filipino, Araling Panlipunan and GMRC are likely Filipino-medium at every grade. If their curriculum guides are written in Filipino, then their competencies quote directly into a Filipino artifact and must be translated for an English reading copy — the exact reverse of the Grades 1–3 Mathematics situation, where an English CG was translated into Filipino. Confirm each CG's language when it is obtained — it determines the direction of every translation in the build.
2. A language subject's content is partly the language itself. In Mathematics an English copy and a Filipino copy teach the same thing. In Filipino or English as a subject, the language of the artifact is not a presentation choice — it is the content. An English reading copy of a Filipino grammar lesson may not be a coherent artifact at all, and the repository's language-variant machinery should not be pointed at one without thought.
3. Grade 1 Language and Reading and Literacy are explicitly L1 areas. Their whole purpose is the learner's first language, which in much of the country is neither Filipino nor English. This repository ships Filipino for Grades 1–3; for these two areas specifically, Filipino is the national language standing in for a mother tongue, and that substitution should be stated in the artifact rather than glossed over.

9. Candidate corrections

Findings that contradict something this repository currently ships. None has been adopted. Each is recorded here, at its tier, for a decision.

The repository's convention is that a breaking finding is flagged first and adopted only on the author's instruction — the same path taken for the Grade 1 descriptive-grading and three-term calendar findings in source-catalogue.md.

9.1 The Grade 1–2 row in the brief is wrong — Tier B

matatag-brief.md §2 lists Grades 1–2 together as "Language, Reading and Literacy, Mathematics, Makabansa, GMRC". Grade 2 does not have Language or Reading and Literacy; it has Filipino and English. See §4.

Impact if adopted: documentation only. No built artifact depends on it — the Grade 2 build is Mathematics, which is unaffected. This one is safe to fix and is corrected in this commit.

9.2 Key Stage 1 descriptive grading is phased — no change needed ✅

Raised, investigated, and resolved in this repository's favour.

DO 015, s. 2026 applies descriptive grading to Key Stage 1, which reads at first glance as covering Kindergarten through Grade 3 — and would have made grades/g02-math/class-record.html and grades/g03-math/class-record.html wrong.

It is phased in by grade, one year at a time. Tier B.

So in the current school year Grade 1 is descriptive and Grades 2 and 3 are still numerically graded — exactly what this repository already ships. No change. The descriptors are A (Advancing), B (Benchmarking), C (Connecting), D (Developing), E (Emerging), which match the five levels in the Grade 1 assessment pack, and no academic awards are conferred in Key Stage 1.

Diarise it, though. The Grade 2 class record becomes wrong in SY 2027–2028 and the Grade 3 one in SY 2028–2029. Both are correct today and both have an expiry date.

9.3 EPP/TLE and MAPEH are 20/60/20, not 20/50/30 — Tier C

See §6.

Impact if adopted: none today — neither area is built. But it must be settled before either one is, because the class record, the rubric poster and the assessment pack all encode the weights.

9.4 Four learning areas may be four-day weeks — Tier C

See §7.

Impact if adopted: none today. Structural for Filipino, AP, EPP/TLE and MAPEH when built.

9.5 The language rule needs a learning-area axis — Tier B

ARTIFACT-SPEC.md §5 sets language by key stage alone. EPP/TLE's guide sets its own medium — Filipino for Grades 4–5, English from Grade 6 — so a single grade band carries two languages depending on the area. See §8.

Impact if adopted: none to any shipped artifact. The existing rule is correctly justified "for Mathematics" and every built grade is Mathematics. But the rule must gain the area axis before a non-Mathematics Grade 4 or 5 artifact is written, or the first EPP artifact will be in the wrong language and the test suite will not notice, because it only knows about key stages.

10. Per-area dossiers

Each entry records what is known, what it means for a build, and what is missing. No entry contains a competency, because none could be obtained — see §11.

10.1 MAPEH — Music and Arts · Physical Education and Health

Grades 4–10. The hardest structural fit in the curriculum, and the area whose shape the existing template gets most wrong.

It is two learning areas wearing one name. MAPEH survives as an umbrella in DepEd's grading rules and on the report card, but no document titled "MATATAG MAPEH Curriculum Guide exists". There are two: Music and Arts and Physical Education and Health, each Grades 4–10, each with its own standards and its own sequence. Tier B.

Critically, this is not the historic four components. DepEd's rule is explicit that MAPEH is "computed as two (2) components … and not anymore as four (4) separate components", and the MATATAG report card carries two MAPEH sub-rows. Modelling MAPEH as four would repeat the exact error that put seven wrong rows in the Mathematics spine — it is the pre-MATATAG structure.

The one reusable structural find. PE and Health's four quarters are a fixed widening circle of wellness — Q1 Personal → Q2 Family → Q3 Community → Q4 Societal — holding at every grade checked (4, 5, 6, 7). Tier B. And every quarter content standard pairs a health topic with a movement category in a single sentence: Grade 7 Q1 is mentally-healthy-adolescent characteristics and target games. The guide refuses to separate them.

That pairing breaks "one competency per built week" outright. Split it and you ship either a health worksheet, which is not PE, or a games session, which is not Health. The atomic unit here is a pair, not a competency.

Music and Arts runs on a different axis again — an expanding cultural scope from own locality → Philippine history → Southeast Asia → Asia → World → Philippine Creative Industries. That is a history-and-culture spine, not a skills spine, and a three-domain template misrepresents it.

What a browser game can honestly do here — narrower than Mathematics, but real, and all of it offline and asset-light: rhythm and notation reading (arithmetic in disguise — the existing numeric machinery transfers almost unchanged), staff and pitch, colour theory and the elements of art in pure CSS and inline SVG, and — the richest seam — Health: food labels, Go/Grow/Glow sorting, Pinggang Pinoy plate-building, heart-rate zones, BMI, first-aid sequencing, hazard- spotting in a drawn scene. All numeric or orderable, all auto-checkable.

What it must never do: score singing, movement, or ensemble playing. That is the 60%, and it is observed by a teacher, not by software. For PE the digital artifact is the pre-brief and the debrief — never the activity. If the game becomes the PE lesson, the lesson has been destroyed.

The most useful thing this repository could ship for MAPEH is not a game. It is a printable one-page class observation grid — forty names by five criteria, tick boxes — that a teacher carries on a clipboard around a schoolyard. It costs one sheet of paper and addresses the 60%.

Biggest gaps: the names of the four strands in either guide (both documents say "the interrelated nature of the four strands"; neither strand set could be recovered), and the entire Music and Arts quarter map at every grade.

10.2 GMRC and Values Education

Grades 1–6 and 7–10, in one curriculum guide spanning Grades 1–10 (~296 pages) — the only other learning area besides Mathematics with a single 1–10 document.

A correction to carry forward: Edukasyon sa Pagpapakatao is not the Filipino name of the Grades 7–10 area. EsP was abolished and replaced by GMRC and Values Education, not renamed. Do not label MATATAG artifacts "Edukasyon sa Pagpapakatao". Tier B.

This area has a statute behind it. Republic Act 11476, the GMRC and Values Education Act (2020), requires GMRC as a separate subject in Grades 1–6 "with the same time allotment as the other core subjects", Values Education likewise in Grades 7–10, with GMRC remaining integrated inside it. Tier B.

The law is unusually prescriptive about pedagogy, and names the methods directly: "role playing in the classroom, community immersion activities, teacher-parent collaborative learning activities, school-initiated values formation activities, simulated activities, and other forms of experiential learning."

A screen-based artifact is not what the statute foregrounds. For this area the offline pack is the flagship deliverable and the screen is the accessory — the reverse of every assumption the Mathematics build made.

The report card carries two separate things, and an artifact must never conflate them: a GMRC/VE subject grade, and a character observation record on the four core values (Maka-Diyos, Makatao, Makakalikasan, Makabansa) marked AO / SO / RO / NO and deliberately kept off the numeric scale. An artifact producing a score that fed the observed-values marks would be a category error with real consequences for a child's record.

A translation problem with no clean solution. Kapwa, kilos-loob, pagpapakatao, dangal, pagsasabuhay, pagsangguni are load-bearing constructs in Filipino moral philosophy. Kapwa is not "others"; kilos-loob is not "will". An English artifact that renders them as their nearest English word teaches a different subject. If an English copy is built, these terms should be retained untranslated with a gloss on first use — a narrow, deliberate exception to the one-language rule, written down rather than improvised.

On the game — stated plainly: a scored browser game is the wrong artifact for this learning area. Not because it is hard, but because what it would score is a child's character, and because a moral dilemma with a marked correct answer teaches that the skill is guessing which answer the adult wants. Two further hazards: the faith strand must never be auto-checked in a plural classroom, and a reflection tool collects sensitive disclosures from minors — local-only, teacher-invisible, one-tap deletable, no telemetry. Offline-first gives you that architecture for free, which is a rare case of the ethics and the engineering agreeing.

What to build instead: Grades 1–3, an unscored practice simulator for conventions — mano po, po/opo, queueing, waste segregation — where feedback reads "this is what is customarily done", never "wrong". Grades 4–6, an unscored scenario explorer that states on screen that walang iisang tamang sagot. Grades 7–10, a deliberation workspace whose stages are the curriculum's own macro skills — Pag-unawa → Pagsangguni → Pagninilay → Pagpapasya → Pagkilos → Pagsasabuhay. That last one is the strongest idea in this dossier: it makes the syllabus's own skill sequence into the interaction model, and its output is a legitimate Performance Task carrying cognitive, affective and behavioural evidence in one object — exactly what the grading rule demands.

Biggest gaps: the content domains (a four-theme hypothesis exists but the themes demonstrably recur across quarters rather than partitioning them, so ship the domain axis empty), the quarter map at every grade, and whether the guide has five macro skills or six.

10.3 EPP and TLE

Grades 4–10, in one curriculum guide. EPP and TLE are not two learning areas — they are the elementary and junior-high names of one continuous area, and the guide's own title for it is the slash-pair "Edukasyong Pantahanan at Pangkabuhayan (EPP)/Technology and Livelihood Education (TLE)" across all seven grades.

Four components, and two corrections to the common account. Entrepreneurship is not a component — it is integrated into every competency in every component. And the home-economics component is not called Home Economics in MATATAG:

Home Economics is the legacy K-12 name. Sources that use it are describing the old curriculum. Use FCS; accept HE as a search synonym only. Tier B.

The structural find, and it is the most useful in this dossier. The quarter is the component, exclusively: Q1 ICT → Q2 AFA → Q3 FCS → Q4 IA, holding across Grades 4–8 and independently matching the order the grade-level standards list them in. Tier B.

Two consequences follow, and both invert how the Mathematics template thinks:

1. The spiral runs down the quarter columns, not across the year. G4Q1 → G5Q1 → G6Q1 → G7Q1 is a coherent five-year ICT ladder: booting a computer → email and desktop publishing → multimedia and basic coding → OSH and ICT tools. G5Q1 → G5Q2 is not a progression at all — it is a hard cut from a computer lab to a poultry pen. The vertical axis is (component, quarter-slot), not (grade, week).
2. Four components do not divide into three terms. Under the SY 2026–2027 three-term calendar the rotation has been redistributed somehow — split, doubled up, or abandoned — and which is not established. The CG's quarter map is now a content specification, not a schedule.

Grades 9–10 have no canonical content. The guide publishes those grades as "GRADES 9 OR 10" sections, one per component, and each school declares which sectors it will offer according to its resources — DepEd ran a national data call in 2025 to collect exactly that. There is no "the Grade 9 TLE syllabus" to generate; there is a syllabus per (component, sector), of which there are roughly 25–30 valid combinations. Either ship a picker or scope to Grades 4–8 and say so. Silently generating one arbitrary Grade 9 track would be the Mathematics failure repeating.

One skill per component per quarter. The guide's own stated design feature: each quarter builds to a culminating output — a planted plot, a sewn item, a preserved food, a wired board, a formatted document. Weeks are steps toward it. Generate eight disconnected weeks with no project and you have defeated the feature the curriculum was redesigned around.

Safety is not a footnote here. This area involves knives, hot oil, hot irons, bolos, welding arcs and — at Grade 8 Q4 and in Grades 9–10 Industrial Arts — household mains wiring. Rules worth enforcing at generation time rather than in review:

• No generated activity may instruct a learner to work on an energised circuit. Ever. De-energised, unplugged, or mock-up only.
• No open flame or hot oil without an explicit adult-supervision flag.
• Every activity carries hazard → control → PPE → supervision level, and a generated activity that trips a hazard rule without a control is a build failure, not a warning.

An unsafe instruction in a Mathematics worksheet is embarrassing. An unsafe instruction in a TLE worksheet injures a child.

The strongest artifact idea in this whole dossier is here. Quarter 1 is ICT in every grade from 4 to 8, and the competency is operating a computer — which a school with no working computers cannot deliver. A phone-browser artifact is the only thing in this repository's toolkit that can substitute for hardware the school does not have: identify parts, sequence a boot and shutdown, locate keys on a rendered keyboard, drag-and-drop, navigate a simulated file tree, save and rename, compose an email with correct netiquette, run block-coding puzzles. Not a game bolted onto a syllabus — a lab substitute.

It must ship with a paper twin, because not every learner will have even a phone: printed keyboard mats, traced menu screens, unplugged algorithm cards, paper email forms, cut-out software-type sorting cards.

Quarters 2–4 cannot be simulated into competence and they cost money — seeds, feed, fingerlings, cloth, thread, salt, cooking gas, wire, timber. Every activity needs a materials list with quantities and estimated pesos, a zero-budget substitute field, and a community-sourcing note. The guide itself calls for stakeholder and LGU participation, so "what to ask the barangay or the PTA for" is aligned with the curriculum, not a workaround.

Biggest gaps: the three-term redistribution (blocks all pacing), Grade 8 Q2 (no source of any kind — listed by rotation inference only, do not ship it), and whether Grades 4–5 competencies are printed in Filipino or English, which decides quote-versus-translate for every Grade 4 artifact.

10.4 Science — ✅ TIER A, the guide is held

Grades 3–10. MATATAG-Science-CG-2023-Grades3-10.pdf is committed at docs/research/source/, 72 pages, with the extracted text beside it. Everything in this section is quoted from it, and where the earlier search-derived research disagreed, the guide wins and the correction is noted.

The first thing the guide settles is a claim this dossier made about every other area. Its glossary is near-identical to the Mathematics one and cites the same two orders — "The definitions within this section are drawn from DepEd Order No. 8, s. 2015 and DepEd Order No. 21, s. 2019." The eight organizers in §2 are no longer an inference from a single document — two independent curriculum guides now agree.

Two axes, and confusing them produces a wrong syllabus.

The guide calls all three of these content strands, and the balanced integration of them is "a central feature of the Science curriculum":

● Performing scientific inquiry skills; ● Understanding and applying scientific knowledge; and ● Developing and demonstrating scientific attitudes and values.

Separately, "the Science curriculum is organized into discipline-oriented domains":

The quarter map — and it is not what a reasonable person would guess

Each quarter is a domain. The guide's own phrase is "domain quarters". So the spine of a Science year is which domain falls in which quarter — and that mapping changes by grade:

Key Stage 2 holds one fixed order. Key Stage 3 is a 4 × 4 Latin square — read any quarter column across Grades 7–10 and each of the four domains appears exactly once. A Grade 8 class does Life Science in Quarter 1 while the Grade 9 class next door does Force, Motion and Energy.

This is the row that justifies the whole "obtain the guide" rule. Everything about the Grades 3–6 pattern invites the assumption that Quarter 1 is Materials throughout. It is true for five grades and wrong for three — very nearly the seven-of-ten error rate the Mathematics spine suffered, and produced by exactly the same reasoning.

Quarter 1 content, per grade

The topic list opening each grade's Quarter 1, verbatim:

Key stage standards, verbatim

• Key Stage 1 (to end of Grade 3) — learners "acquire healthy habits and curiosity about self and their environment using basic process skills of observing, communicating, comparing, classifying, measuring, inferring, and predicting."
• Key Stage 2 (to end of Grade 6) — learners have "the essential skills of scientific inquiry – designing simple investigations, using appropriate procedures and tools to gather evidence, observing patterns, determining relationships, drawing conclusions based on evidence, and communicating ideas in varied ways."
• Key Stage 3 (to end of Grade 10) — learners "demonstrate scientific, environmental, and technological and engineering literacies that would lead to rational choices on issues confronting them", recognising that "if one variable is changed, the effect of the change on another variable can be measured."

Why Science starts at Grade 3, in the guide's own words

"The grade-level standards for Kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2 form part of other curricula, including the English curriculum and the Mathematics curriculum. The content, including learning competencies for these grades, is not included in the Science curriculum."

So the coverage matrix in §3 is confirmed for this area at Tier A — and the reason is not that early learners do no science, but that it is carried inside English and Mathematics. A Grade 3 Science artifact should expect prior learning it cannot see in this guide.

MATATAG also expanded technological literacy to technology and engineering literacy, and names its pedagogies: inquiry-based learning, applications-led approach, science-technology-society, problem-based learning and multi-disciplinary learning.

A trap specific to Science. The pre-2023 K-12 curriculum had a famous spiral — Grade 7 as Earth/Life/Matter/Force by quarter — and it is the first thing that comes to mind for anyone who knows the old curriculum. MATATAG changed it. Do not reconstruct the old spiral from memory; none of it is confirmed here, and this is precisely the failure mode that produced seven wrong Mathematics rows.

Template fit is the best of the seven, with one addition. Science answers can be auto-checked — classification, prediction with a revealed outcome, variable control, unit conversion, circuit and food-web building. What the template lacks is the mandatory quarterly performance task, which is an investigation, not a written test, and needs the same rubric-and- observation treatment MAPEH does.

10.5 Filipino

Grades 2–10 — not Grades 3–10, and not Grades 1–10. Grade 1 is served by Language and Reading and Literacy instead.

Five macro skills, the organising vocabulary: pakikinig (listening), pagsasalita (speaking), pagbasa (reading), pagsulat (writing) and panonood (viewing). The fifth is the one an English-trained eye misses, and it is a real strand — viewing and interpreting visual and multimodal texts. Tier B.

The area is framed around communicative competence, critical analysis of literary and informational texts, and creation of multimodal texts — that last verb matters, because "multimodal text" is a product, which points the assessment at performance tasks rather than quizzes.

The literary spine is fixed by grade at the top end, and is the one piece of per-grade content this dossier can state with reasonable confidence: Grade 9 is Noli Me Tangere and Grade 10 is El Filibusterismo, each set alongside period and contemporary texts. Tier C. Those two are statutory fixtures of Philippine secondary education, which is why they survive a curriculum revision.

The template problem that has no clean answer. For Mathematics, a Filipino copy and an English copy teach the same thing. For Filipino as a subject, the language is not the medium — it is the content. An English reading copy of a Filipino grammar lesson is not a translation of the artifact; it is a different artifact teaching a different thing.

Recommendation: do not generate English variants for this area at all. The language-variant machinery exists to let a non-Filipino-speaking adult read a teacher document. For Filipino, the teacher document is about Filipino and the teacher speaks it. Shipping an English copy would be machinery applied because it exists, not because it helps.

What a browser game can do: the auto-checkable slice is real but narrower than Mathematics — pagbabaybay, affixation and panlapi patterns, pang-ugnay, subject-predicate identification, word order, vocabulary matching, ordering events in a narrative, matching a text to its type. Comprehension, composition and oral fluency are not auto-checkable and belong to the 50%.

10.6 English

Grades 2–10, sharing its start year and its four-day-week status with Filipino.

Organised on the four macro skills — speaking, listening, reading, writing — under a literacy domain defined as understanding and creating texts in varied settings and for different purposes. Tier B.

For Key Stage 1 the guide names eight subdomains, which is the most concrete structural detail obtained for this area: Oral Language · Phonological Awareness · Phonics · Word Study · Grammar Awareness · Vocabulary · Comprehending and Analyzing Texts · Creating and Composing Texts. Tier C.

⚠️ A conflict to resolve before building. Sources describe the English guide's key stage standards as "by the end of Grade 6 (Key Stage 1)" and "by the end of Grade 10 (Key Stage 2)". That contradicts the Tier A DepEd-wide definition in §2 — Key Stage 1 is Kindergarten to Grade 3, Key Stage 2 is Grades 4–6, Key Stage 3 is Grades 7–10. Either the English guide numbers its stages differently from the rest of the curriculum, or the secondary sources are wrong.

Tier A beats Tier C, so the DepEd-wide definition is what this repository holds — but do not silently discard the conflict. It is exactly the sort of detail that would make an English syllabus's standards section wrong in a way no reviewer would catch.

The same content-versus-medium problem as Filipino, mirrored — and with the same answer. An artifact teaching English is in English at every grade, including Grades 2 and 3 where every other learning area is in the mother tongue. This is the one legitimate exception to the Key Stage 1 Filipino rule, and the test suite currently asserts that rule per key stage, so it will fail an English Grade 2 artifact that is correctly written in English. The guard needs the area axis before this area is built — the same change §9.5 already calls for.

What a browser game can do: phonics and phonological awareness are genuinely auto-checkable and matter most exactly where the learners are youngest — rhyme, onset and rime, syllable counting, grapheme-phoneme matching. Above that: word study and affixes, grammar-awareness transformations, vocabulary in context, sentence ordering, matching text type to purpose. Reading comprehension can be auto-checked only at the retrieval level; inference and composition cannot, and pretending otherwise would misrepresent the subject.

10.7 Araling Panlipunan, and Makabansa

Makabansa covers Grades 1–3; Araling Panlipunan covers Grades 4–10. Two guides, and the handover at Grade 4 is where an integrated early-grades area becomes a discipline.

Makabansa is not a merger. DepEd has stated it is "a distinct and foundational learning area for Key Stage 1 … not a combination or merger of Araling Panlipunan and MAPEH", using a holistic, transdisciplinary approach. Tier B. Do not model it as a container of components — that is exactly the misreading DepEd went on record to correct, and in August 2026 it separately denied a rumoured AP–MAPEH merger at the upper grades.

Araling Panlipunan runs on seven themes — the clearest domain set obtained for any of the seven areas, and unusually well suited to a repeating template:

1. People, Society and Environment
2. Time, Continuity and Change
3. Culture, Identity and Nationhood
4. Rights, Responsibility and Citizenship
5. Power, Authority and Governance
6. Production, Distribution and Consumption
7. Regional and International Relations

Tier C, but coherent, and seven themes across four quarters means the themes recur rather than partition — the same shape found in GMRC, and the opposite of EPP/TLE's exclusive rotation.

MATATAG changed the grade sequence, and the old one is the trap. Anyone who knows the previous K-12 AP will recall Grade 7 as Asya, Grade 8 as Daigdig, Grade 9 Ekonomiks, Grade 10 Kontemporaryong Isyu. What MATATAG actually does, Tier C:

Grade 7 is the row that proves the discipline was worth applying. Asya is the plausible answer, it is what the old curriculum said, and it is wrong — the framing narrowed to the Philippines within Southeast Asia. Grades 9 and 10 look continuous with the old sequence; Grade 7 does not.

Template fit. Nothing here auto-checks the way arithmetic does — AP is narrative, source- interpretation, map work and civic participation. But a browser game has honest work: map placement, timeline ordering, matching a source to its type or its bias, classifying a scenario against the seven themes, tracing a supply chain, reading a population or trade graph. Sequencing and classification are auto-checkable and are genuinely what a social-studies learner practises.

What must not be auto-checked is interpretation or civic judgement — the same boundary GMRC needs, for the same reason.

11. What could not be established

Stated plainly, because the gaps are the point of a shopping list.

• No learning competency for any area except Science, at any grade. The quarter maps that would let a syllabus be written do not exist in this dossier for the other six, and anything resembling one found in search results was rejected rather than recorded. Science is the exception and is complete — see §10.4.
• No key stage standard or grade level standard verbatim, for any area but Science. Several are known in paraphrase; none of the others is a transcription.
• No content standard or performance standard verbatim, for any area.
• The strand names inside both MAPEH guides. Each says "the interrelated nature of the four strands" and neither strand set could be recovered. Probably five minutes with the PDF open.
• The entire Music and Arts quarter map, at every grade.
• The three-term redistribution. DO 009, s. 2026 replaced four quarters with three terms for the school year now running, and the guides still say "Quarter". Every quarter map in this dossier is therefore a content specification, not a schedule. The mapping was not obtained for any area, and it blocks week-level pacing for all of them.
• Whether the English guide really numbers its key stages differently from the DepEd-wide definition — see §10.6.
• The exact filenames. Titles are known; mirrors disagree on prefixes and separators.
• Whether DO 015, s. 2026's weights are as reported. The 20/60/20 row for EPP/TLE and MAPEH has three sources and continues an established pattern, but no one has read the order.

What is now established, and was not before: the coverage matrix, the eleven documents to obtain, the assessment split by area, the days-per-week split, the medium of instruction as an area-level property, and a usable domain or theme set for five of the seven areas — Science, EPP/ TLE, MAPEH's PE half, Araling Panlipunan, and both language areas. That is enough to plan a build. It is not enough to write one.

Everything in this list is answered by one of the eleven documents in §5.

Sources

Search-derived, and listed so the trail can be re-walked. None of these pages was opened — the egress proxy refused every one. They are recorded from search results.

• DepEd, Revised K to 10 Curriculum — the canonical home of every CG
• DepEd LR Portal, Revised K-10 LMs — sites.google.com/deped.gov.ph/deped-lrportal/revised-k-10-lms
• DepEd Order No. 8, s. 2015 — Policy Guidelines on Classroom Assessment (cited Tier A by the Mathematics CG)
• DepEd Order No. 21, s. 2019 — Policy Guidelines on the K to 12 Basic Education Program (cited Tier A by the Mathematics CG)
• DepEd Order No. 22, s. 2021 — Financial Education Policy (cited Tier A by the Mathematics CG)
• DepEd Order No. 12, s. 2024 — flexibility in time allotment
• DepEd Order No. 015, s. 2026 — revised classroom assessment and grading
• DepEd Order No. 009, s. 2026 — the three-term calendar
• Republic Act 11476 — the GMRC and Values Education Act
• Mirrors carrying CG titles: slideshare.net, scribd.com, studocu.com, teachpinas.com, matatagcurriculum.ph