Development of Storybook to Improve Early Children's Reading Ability

Abstract Early childhood reading skills are focused on recognizing reading materials such as magazines, daily journals, children's activity books, books of picture, animal series books, and other books that can improve children's early reading skills. This is rarely understood by some PAUD teachers in Indonesia, resulting in misunderstandings in learning activities. This research aims to develop children's story book by themes as an effort to stimulate early childhood reading skills. Another goal is to find out the feasibility of using children's story books by themes as an effort to stimulate early childhood reading skills. The methode of research used is research and development which is modified from the model developed by Borg and Gall. The research development procedure is carried out through six stages, (a) Collect of information (b) compiling product designs (c) product validation developed (d) product design improvements (e) limited product trials and (6) product results of children's story books. This research resulted in 3 children's story books entitled “Ikan Koi Si Penolong”, “Aku membantu Ayah”, and “Belanja bersama Ibu". Three of books resulting from this development research have gone through the stages of expert validation tests by material experts with a percentage of 92.8%. Meanwhile, the media expert indicator obtained a percentage of 93.7%, which means this book is valid and can be tested on children. Then a trial was conducted by two users, namely the Al-Huda PAUD teacher in Kabupaten Tasikmalaya. The test results obtained the percentage of values of 96.8% and 93.7%, which means that books by themes are appropriate and can be used by teachers to stimulate early childhood reading skills.Keywords: Story books, Early reading, Early childhoo