Parents’ perceptions of School Readiness in Islamic Kindergarten

Entering elementary school is the most important stage in school life of human being. In general, school readiness influenced by child’s school readiness, school readiness for child, and parents and communities readiness. In this term, parents play important role in stimulating children’s readiness such as physical and motoric, emotion, social, language and interest in learning. Therefore, to investigate parents’ opinions about child’s school readiness is needed to obtain data for considering to develop a tool for them. The result showed that there were several misunderstanding in predicting school readiness. Most of them have overestimate in basic thinking skills such as ability to write an essay or a story minimum in 8 sentences and skill to count symbolly up to two digits. Moreover, parents reported emotional regulation ability less important than other and assumed it will increase naturally during learning at school. This misunderstanding lead to over stimulate in cognitive ability and less concern in socioemotional aspect. Furthermore, parents stated that they need handy tools to assess school readiness as the basis for stimulating children at home appropriately. Besides, recognizing Arabian letters is important as a basic knowledge of Islamic Religion for children to learn and recite the Holy Qur’an. In the beginning of education in Islamic elementary school there are many subjects related to this such as Arabian language, Alqur’an hadith, and fiqh.