The Effect of Contextual in Teaching Materials on Writing Kid Stories Grade 4th Elementary School in Surakarta

Children learn to use symbols, combining their oral language, pictures, print, and play into a coherent mixed medium and creating and communicating meanings in a variety of ways. From their initial experiences and interactions with adults, children begin to read words, processing letter-sound relations and acquiring substantial knowledge of the alphabetic system. As they continue to learn, children increasingly consolidate this information into patterns that allow for automaticity and fluency in reading and writing. Consequently, reading and writing acquisition is conceptualized better as a developmental continuum than as an all-or-nothing phenomenon. But the ability to read and write does not develop naturally, without careful planning and instruction. Children need regular and active interactions with print. Specific abilities required for reading and writing come from immediate experiences with oral and written language. Experiences in these early years begin to define the assumptions and expectations about becoming literate and give children the motivation to work toward learning to read and write. From these experiences children learn that reading and writing are valuable tools that will help them do many things in life. The aims of research consist of the following to know effect contextual in teaching materials on writing kid stories grade 4th Elementary School in Surakarta. The study employs experiment method which the data are collected by interview, observation, document analysis, and Forum Group Discussions (FGD), questionnaire, and test. Result of the research sig value. <from α or 0.03 <0.05, so Ho = rejected and H1 = accepted which means there is a difference of effectiveness between learning with conventional teaching material used by teacher with teaching material on writing kid stories based on contextual.