PROSIDING ICTTE FKIP UNS 2015 ISSN: 2502-4124 Vol 1, Nomor 1, Januari 2016 Halaman: | 161 THE IMPLEMENTATION OF HAND-PUPPETS AS A STORYTELLING MEDIA TO THE STUDENTS’ LANGUAGE SKILLS AND CHARACTERS (An R&D on the Second Grader of SDN 6 Karangasem Batang Central Java Indonesia) Joko Sulianto and Fitri Yulianti University of PGRI Semarang Corresponding e-mail: sulianto.jo@gmail.com Abstract: Teaching bahasa to elementary school students has important role in building attitudes, habits, and basic abilities to develop their language skills. Story telling is a part of it. The story teller must have good performance of voice, intonation, and mimic, so that the listeners can understand and enjoy the performance. The story tellers must be supported by appropriate media; they are hand puppets. The objective of this study is to know the implementation of hand-puppets as a story telling media to support students’ language skills and character building of the second graders of SDN 6 Karangasem Batang. It is an R and D research. The data were collected by observing, interviewing teacher, giving tests, and taking documentations. Based on the data, hand-puppets can be used to increase students’ language skills in retelling story. Those data were shown by students’ active participation during the learning process and their interest, enthusiasm, and brave in retelling story in front of their classmates. There were 10 students who joined in retelling story activity actively in “Pembelajaran I”. The numbers of students were increased in “Pembelajaran II”; there were 17 students. The media can also be used as an alternative teaching media to build students’ positive characters that made them easily understand and catch the moral value of each story. The researchers suggest to the teachers to create some more interesting media that make the students more fun and interested in joining the learning process. Keywords: R&D, hand-puppets, retelling story, sd 6 karangasem batang 1 INTRODUCTION Human is a social creature that needs to interact with other. Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher, states in Tirtarahardja (2008: 19) that a human is only a human in his society. None can live alone without other people. To get connected with other, they need to have good communication. Language is one of the communication tools. On his book, Tarigan (2008: 9) states that by building good communication through language, people can share ideas, feelings, and dreams through words. To support this statement, Delimasa (2012) states that learning process in primary school is the most important part of children’s life to build children’s basic habits, attitudes, and skills to help them increasing their language skills in general. Language skills which are consisted of listening, speaking, reading, and writing have close relationship from one to each other (Cahyani, 2007: 8). The other expert, Tarigan (2008: 1) calls this relationship as “Catur Tunggal”. Communication skills, especially in speaking, can be learned everywhere, every time. Family is the narrowest area to start speaking learning very first time. In learning process in school, speaking activity can be done through a storytelling activity. Cahyani (2007: 67) identifies the benefit of storytelling activity, they are (1) giving pleasure, (2) teaching truth, and (3) giving real model. Someone can share his idea, feeling, information, and hope through storytelling activity. It means that storytelling activity is not only telling the story to others, but also building mental and emotional relationship between the storyteller and the listeners or audiences. A story must have a message within. The message is often being a strategy from the storyteller to build the listeners’ characters. Character is person’s special signature which differ one to the others. Someone who has good characters can make decisions to his life and must have high responsibility for every decision he made.