Abstract
The purpose of our experiment is to create an educational environment where children are encouraged to act as valuable members of society. In 1990, The Ministry of Education appointed Haruta Higashi Elememtary School as a Primary Education Development Project School. Since then, We have been working very hard to fulfill and improve our children's fundamental scholastic ability within the primary education curriculum. We have three objectives in accordance with the procedures of our project. The fist objective: How can we improve our school curriculum, judging from our present children's condition and the process of our education situation? The next: What basic scholastic achievements will support the program? And the last: How should this curriculum be presented? With these three objectives, we have further developed our studies concerning how to proceed and present the new curriculum. From our studies, we have actually established differrent hypotheses which lead to facts on other studies that support the primary education curriculum. As we struggled to present project experiences, trying to change knowledge into action, we came to a conclusion that the real new primary education is the lesson we have been trying go hard to provide the children with: the SEIKATU-TAIKEN-KA (a lesson teaching the children how to live a better life as a human through experiences with their whole mind and body). We have adopted this SEIKATU-TAIKEN-KA lesson is to enable the child to be an individual who can cope actively with the ability to live as a valuable member of this rapidly changing society. We actually took an interest in things that exist around us, such as International Culture, Industrial Techniques, Welfare Problems, and General Communications. We immersed the children in these activities and provided them with opportunities that will enable them to support themselves and gain the fundamental power to face the big changes in society, therefore enabling them to live a better life. This SEIKATU-TAIKEN-KA lesson is to give children the ability to practice in the future what they study now. The children will understand International matters, Welfare matters, Communication and Technical matters which they will have learned by actually participating in these activities. Therefore, when we talk about the activities in this SEIKATU-TAIKEN-KA lesson, the activity itself is the object, the plan, and the program. We have divided this SEIKATU-TAIKEN-KA lesson into four main fields. 1) International 2) Industrial 3) Welfare 4) Communication During these activities, because we want the children to take the initiative in the activities, the thoughts and imaginations of the children will be listened to and accepted. The teacher's ideas will support and enhance the activities to a better standard, at the same time, becoming the life stage curriculum. So each activity we have adopted will improve the life stage curriculum. We made sure all of the children who participated will always have some part in with those activities that follow. At the same time we also endured that the aim of the activity was focused on the correct subject, to insure the learning quality of the activity.
