The quality of descriptive children literature books prepared for primary school students from first grade to third grade

It is known that books play an important role in the development of cognitive, perceptual and language skills of school-age children. As well as being instructive, these books should also be entertaining. For the child to gain the reading habit and to enjoy reading, the books should be atractive but not boring while reading. Recently, in the field of children literature, which is getting more and more important day by day, many publishers produce various books. And it is quite hard to choose among the numerous books the one that is appropriate for the child. Because of the fact that there is not any supervising institution in this field, there are poor quality works alongside high-quality ones. This study is important to determine the characteristics that the books in the market should have.The purpose of the study is to asssess the works of children literature prepared for primary school students from grade first to grade third in terms of their content, illustration and physical characteristics, and to determine the frequency with which the books deal with the basic values.In this respect, by means of random sampling, totally fifty books from different kinds (story, fairy tale and novel) were selected. The method of the research is qualitative, more specifically document research. For analysis of the data frequency and percentile were used. For the data collection procedure ?Visual Design and Content Evaluation Scale? and ?Values Checklist? , which were developed by the researchers, were used.The results of the study show that all of the fifty books could meet the selected criteria in terms of visual characteristics such as cover page (4,49), binding(5), paper(5), page layout(4,05), typeface(4,64) and illustration(3,80). And in terms of content characteristics such as subject/type(4,54), construction(4,76), message (4,24), character (4,49), time(5), place(4,96), language and expression(4,98), lexicology(4,97) and rhetoric(4,66), the sample books could meet the selected criteria.These books were evaluated also with respect to values they contain about character education that is getting more important recently. As a result, the most frequently mentioned values were love, respect and helping each other.Key Words: Children literature, reading habit, reading love, visual conception, characteristic of the content.