The study on the National Curriculum Guidelines for Kindergarten in Japan and Korea Focusing on Activity

The purpose of this paper is to compare the national curriculum guidelines for kindergarten in Japan and Korea focusing on activity. The study shows that both guidelines deal children's activity as an important process to achieve the goals of kindergarten education. However, the way each guideline deals activity in the whole curriculum structure is different. The differences become clear through investigating activity from its relation to principle of curriculum-construction, instructing plan, and the role of teachers. In Japanese guidelines, the curriculum-construction starts from each child's voluntary play, an activity and through it, each child collects experiences by their needs. In the end, the activities consisted by each child’s own choices construct the curriculum. Therefore, Instructing plan and the role of teacher are focusing on setting an environment for each child’s voluntary activity. In Korean guidelines, the curriculum is constructed by children’s performance of the multitude activities which has fixed ahead regarding particular topic and certain field or type of the activity. Therefore, instru cting plan and the role of teachers are focusing on setting the multitude activity in advance and the tactics to induce children to the fixed activities