The investigation of the story books used in pre-school education with regard to children's rights

The main objective of this study is to investigate the awareness of parents, teachers and directors who play important role in preschool education, with regard to children's rights and their preferences of story books. A total of 5 kindergarten director, 10 pre-school teachers and 40 parents were participated in this qualitative study on a voluntary basis. The data were collected through observation, interview and semi-structured questionnaire in 2017-2018 academic year. First, the data gathered from the questionnaires and the books that were selected according to participants' book preferences were analyzed according to content analysis method. The books were analyzed through deductive content analysis technique based on four categories of Children's Rights. The results showed that although the participants acknowledged the importance of Children's Rights, their knowledge about it requires more attention. Moreover, the content analysis of the books revealed that the development rights were the most highly mentioned rights in the books, which were followed by survival and protection rights. Rights of participation were the least mentioned rights in the children's story books examined in this study. In the light of the results, several implications for programme developers, educators, researchers and parents were presented.