Abstract
The purpose of this paper was to formulate a curriculum aimed at developing reasoning skills based on the Philosophy for Children program, and to propose the utility of such a curriculum. In the program various approaches, such as development of teaching materials, class practice and ability assessment, are investigated. The curriculum is composed of a number of reading texts. Harry Stottlemeier's Discovery, which is one of these textbooks, takes a leading role in the curriculum. In this research we created a Japanese version of this text and the accompanying curriculum, put it into practice in class and investigated reasoning skills. In the class practice, children actively discussed the content of the text, including philosophical elements, by applying reasoning skills. Moreover, in looking at the children's reasoning skills, the increase in scores from pretest to posttest was statistically significant. Our results confirmed that the class had a positive effect on the children's reasoning skills.
