Analysis of Content-Structure on Early Childhood Curriculum Guidebook: Reading of Children’s Learning Based on Five Domains

This study attempted to analyze the educational contents in the early childhood curriculum guidebook for teachers’ skill of reading and understanding of children’s learning of play-based early childhood curriculum. This study particularly used a text hermeneutic approach for in-depth analysis of educational contents in five domains and organizing structure of the contents in Nuri curriculum guidebook by using methods of reading, re-reading and re-writing. The three conditions, concreteness, abundances, and relevance were selected, which are important for critical analysis to determine whether the explanations of the five contents in the guidebook are easy and useful enough for teachers to implement play-based Nuri-curriculum. After the critical analysis of the 59 educational contents, this study tried to create the frame of each of five domains, so that the teachers are able to view the contents-specific sub-contents at once. This would be very helpful for early childhood teachers to practically utilize the educational contents for reading of children’s learning through play. Then this study provided the way of using the contents and understanding of the contents in the analytic frame for teachers to read children’s learning based on children’s play. The way of read children’s learning by using the contents understanding in the frame would help the teachers move from simple play-record to more learning record, so they will be able to feel the real implementation of early childhood curriculum, which must be based of educational contents, but not play itself. At this point, this study also tried to use drawing, framework, and pathway etc. in order to visualize the results of the study so that the teachers could be more open mind and expand the meaning of results. This study finally suggests the need for further research to strengthen teachers' competencies in implementing play-based curricula and underscores the importance of communities of practice for exploring educational content.