Investigation of the effect of the early literacy education program on the early literacy skills of 60- 69 monthly children

In this study, it was aimed to examine the effect of the "Early Literacy Education Program" on the early literacy skills of 60-69 months old children attending pre-school education. The study group of the research consisted of a total of 24 children, 12 of which were in the experimental group and 12 in the control group, who were educated in a private kindergarten selected by the purposeful sampling method from the schools affiliated to the Provincial Directorate of Family and Social Services in the city center of Samsun in the 2020-2021 academic year. Pretest-posttest, quasi-experimental design with control group was used in the study. The "Early Literacy Skills Assessment Tool" developed by Karaman (2013) was used as a data collection tool. The education program prepared within the scope of the research was applied to the children in the experimental group in the form of activities of approximately 40 minutes for four weeks, five days a week. The children in the control group continued the education given by their classroom teachers during the four-week period. After the training program implementations were completed, post-tests were applied to both the experimental and control groups. The retention test was applied to the experimental group three weeks after the post-tests were administered. The data obtained from the research were analyzed with the IBM SPSS 22 Package Program. According to the findings obtained from the research, there was no significant difference between the pre-test results, and a significant difference was observed between the post-test results of the experimental and control groups. While there was a significant difference between the pretest and posttest results in all subtests of phonological awareness, print awareness, understanding the story, matching images and pre-writing skills of the data collection tool of the experimental group; There was a significant difference only in the pre-writing skills subtest of the control group. It was found that there was no significant difference between the post-test results of the experimental group and the results of the permanence test, and the results obtained showed permanence for at least three weeks. As a result of the research, it was seen that the "Early Literacy Education Program" was effective on children's early literacy skills. The results obtained in the research were discussed in the context of the relevant literature and suggestions were developed in this context. KEYWORDS: Preschool, Early literacy, Early literacy skills