SASTRA ANAK DAN PEMBENTUKAN KARAKTER

Children’s Literature and Character Building. This article aims to describe roles and strategies of the learning of children’s literature in character education. In terms of the materials, literature has already contained “raw materials” to build children’s character. Literature is culture in action containing life models. The concept of people with ideal character highly appreciating morality and great values is concretely manifested in the story characters’ attitudes and behaviors. Children can imitate the heroes with ideal norms and take their attitudes and behaviors as examples. Moreover, at their age, children like to imitate behaviors of people that they admire. To prevent literature learning from becoming rote learning, teachers and parents should work in synergy to help children read, understand, and give examples of concrete attitudes and behaviors so that the internalization process takes place. Therefore, story-telling activities for children should be routinely conducted and reading habits should be inculcated since the early age. Keywords: children’s literature, character building, culture in behavior