LOCAL PLANTS AS ALTERNATIVE MEDIA TO PROMOTE CHILD FRIENDLY LEARNING: BEST PRACTICE IN RA AL HIKMAH AND RA AL MUTA’ALIMIN, SEMARANG MUNICIPALITY

Abstract

A local milieu media has an important role in learning process to facilitate the child development on the cognitive, motoric, language, social, emotion, and kinaesthetic domains. It also promotes child friendly learning, accommodating provision, protection, and participation (3P:s) principles. This paper presents a best practice on the implementation of local plants as local environment media in RA Al Hikmah and RA Al Muta’alimin, Semarang Municipality, Central Java. Local plants, a non-classical realistic learning was implemented in 1 st semester period in 2014. The field observation focused on teacher and children impacts. In teacher’s perspective, this media was flexible, accessible, and available objects found in school surroundings and have possibility to manipulate the environment. In children’ perspective, it gave joyful, recreational, experiencing, interesting, and realistic learning to enhance cognitive, motoric, language, social, emotion, and kinaesthetic domains. It is also safe for the children in doing their activities and activates children in learning process. It is highly recommended as an alternative media to be implemented for early child education in different local settings or in different manipulatedenvironments.