Abstract
The purpose of this study was to investigate the actual conditions and characteristics of weekly and daily child care programs for infants, to provide a basis for the improvement of infant care quality. Weekly and daily curricula of 18 classes for one and two-year-olds classes (9 for each ages) from childcare centers in D city were collected from Nov. 2009 to February 2010. The results are as following: first, classes for one-year-olds plan 6-25 activities and classes for two-year-olds plan 12-30 activities weekly, with differences in the number of weekly activities according to the childcare centers. The number of weekly activities should be planned considering infants' interest as well as educational continuity of the activities. Second, the investigation of daily activities showed that the routine activities planned for one-year-olds were for total of 310-600 minutes and for two-year-olds 310-540 minutes. Among these, on average of 66% of the time was planned for everyday life such as eating and napping. The rest of time was dedicated to indoor and outdoor free play. However a few centers allocated more time for group activities according to subjects compared to free play. A curriculum composed of group activities ignoring infants' individual developmental differences should not be encouraged. Last, the results of cluster analyses on weekly and daily curricula in terms of the number of activities and time, duration, number of group activities and time showed that curricula for infants could be characterized into two types: "free play" and "group activity" curricula.
