Banu Setyo Adi, Djoko Pekik Irianto, Yustinus Sukarmin
Many traditional games from various parts of Indonesia, particularly Yogyakarta, may support children's learning in the early years. The study aims to explore the teachers’ perception in implementing, understanding, and adapting traditional games that could develop students’ motor skills in kindergarten. This research employed a quantitative descriptive approach with a questionnaire as its instrument, with an Aiken-V as its validation. The study was carried out at kindergartens partnered with the Early-Childhood Teacher Education Department, Faculty of Education, Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta, with several 35 kindergarten teachers participating. The results showed that the teacher’s perspectives of traditional games were generally limited to a superficial understanding and were not yet robust in terms of their benefits to other learning aspects. The implementation of traditional games in learning was heterogeneous and merely based on the understanding of each teacher. Teachers relied on curriculum sources to adapt to conventional games and were hesitant to expand their knowledge with other sources. It was shown that these kindergarten teachers were unable to properly utilize traditional games in physical motor instruction. Teachers must gain a deeper grasp of traditional games and learn about the features of early development in order to integrate them into the classroom. © 2022, author.
Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta, Indonesia
