Music education for infants plays a significant role in developing infants' learning capability and social adaptability as it affects their emotional, cognitive and physical development and it also helps infants to enjoy music and to grow in aesthetic...
Music education for infants plays a significant role in developing infants' learning capability and social adaptability as it affects their emotional, cognitive and physical development and it also helps infants to enjoy music and to grow in aesthetic sensibility. Therefore, the primary purpose of music education for infants is not educating the talented to become professional artists or musicians but educating a whole person in infants by making connections with other education areas.
This study is to look into how properly infant music guides currently used in kindergartens organize the songs according to infants' developmental areas and to come up with some criteria for teachers in selecting appropriate music guidebooks and some suggestions to pursue better quality of those guides. In order to do this, this study has done comparative analysis on different music guidebooks which are widely used in kindergartens in Korea.
As for the theoretical basis, the importance of infant music education, qualities of musical development, principles of teaching infants' singing, some teaching methods of music education theorists, the 6th national curriculum of kindergarten education have been carefully reviewed and discussed. Three well known music guides were selected and they were compared and analyzed in terms of nine aspects: target areas, activities, words of the songs, forms, tonality, range, time, rhythm and materials to be prepared
The result shows that cognitive area occupies more than 30% in all the studied music guides, the highest percentage among all the areas. When it comes to words of the songs, two guides strictly conforms to the 6th national music education curriculum by including every theme presented in the curriculum: kindergarten and I, seasons, animals, family and neighbors, transportations, tools and machines, healthy body and mind, my country and foreign countries, earth and environment, special days. However, the third music guide, Infant Music Education, doesn't include 'special days.'
Most songs in three guides are in short forms with 8-16 bars due to developmental stage of target learners. There are some Korean traditional songs in minor key, which makes these guides enriched in tonality. Quadruple time is dominant in all three guides. It is interesting to note that songs in triple time make the second highest percentage in Infant Music Education while they are the third place in percentage in the other two music guides. In Teaching Material for Kindergarten Education, triple time makes 16.2% and in Infant Music Education 2000, it makes 14.7%. It seems that Infant Music Education attempts to introduce more dynamic arrangement of songs with regard to time.
Regarding the materials to be prepared, Teaching Material for Kindergarten Education and Infant Music Education 2000 utilize pictures and drawings up to about 50% while Infant Music Education uses words board up to 45.8%.
It appears that music guides for infants should be improved by presenting diverse contents and methods so that young infants may be more attached to singing naturally. To accomplish this goal, it may take a lot of new challenges such as developing new methods, using advanced technology and equipments and studying music education itself more seriously.