PREVENTION OF SCHOOL ANXIETY BY MEANS OF PLAY THERAPY

The presented research results show the relevance of research and preventive psychocorrective work in the direction of psychological readiness for school. School anxiety and low self-esteem of a child affect not only academic success, but also the quality of life and personality formation. The developed and tested program, which includes diagnostics and exercises of development and correction based on game therapy, helps to reduce the index of school anxiety and increase the index of self-esteem (at the stage of pre-adaptation to school). Materials and methods. The study involved children of the kindergarten preparatory group, in the number of 60 people (6-7 years old), 26 girls and 34 boys. As a specific psychodiagnostic toolkit, the following were used: the "Ladder" technique by Shchur V. G.; a projective technique for diagnosing school anxiety by Prikhozhan A.M., as well as a test battery of techniques aimed at determining the level of readiness for learning and the level of psychological readiness for school (the "House" technique by Gutkin N. I.; the "Pieron-Rouzer" technique by Ruzer P.; method "Graphic dictation" by Elkonin D. B.; Kern-Jirasek test; method "Memorize drawings" by Nemov R. S.; method "Sequence of events" by Bernstein A. N.; Method "Exclusion of objects (the fourth extra)" by N. L. Belopolskaya; method "Ladder" by V. G. Shchur; method of determination the motives of M. R. Ginzburg's teaching; the method of "Drawing the school" by Nizhegorodtseva N. V., N. V. Shadrikova N. V.). Results and discussions. During the correlation analysis, it was found that children have a fairly high level of readiness for school, while the risk group for maladjustment was 11% of children with high level of anxiety and low self-esteem. Conclusions. The results of the study and the implementation of the program for correcting school anxiety and self-esteem will allow us to say that the direction of this work is relevant both in terms of new research and in terms of developing correction programs.