The purpose of this study was to examine what effects philanthropic educational activities using picture
books related with philanthropy had upon young children’s sense of happiness and their peer play
behavior. The subjects of this study were a total of 44 children from two classes for 5-year old children
of W Kindergarten located in G City, and they were allocated in the experimental and control groups,
22 subjects for each group. A philanthropic teaching-learning model using picture books was applied to
the experimental group, and the control group was engaged in activities in which they listened to fairy
tales related with life themes and make conversations. As research tools, this study used the Scale of
Early Children’s Happiness developed by Eunju Lee (2010), and the Scale of Play Behavior, which was
adopted by Choe and Shin (2010) from the PIPPS (Penn Interactive Peer Play Scale) created by Fantuzzo
et al. (1995) and was tested on young children. The results of this study show that there were
significant differences in the scores of happiness between the experimental and control groups, and that
their peer play behavior also had positive effects upon ‘play interaction,’ and ‘play interruption.’ Such
results prove the effectiveness of the philanthropic teaching-learning model using picture books, and
suggest that the model is worth being applied to actual scenes of early childhood education.