The activity of the children centered on positive development of children's social adaptation and emotional awareness levels

This research's main purpose is to measure "the activity of the children centered on positive development of children's social adaptation and emotional awareness levels". At the first stage of the stydy, in order to eveluate the children's levels of social adaptation and emotion arrangement, social competence and behavior assessment scale -30 which was developed by Lafrniere and Dumas (1996) and was made Turkish validity study by Çorapçı, Aksan, Yalçın, Yağmurlu (2010) and emotion arrangement scale which was developed by Shields and Cicchetti (1997) and was made Turkish validity study by Batum and Yağmurlu (2007) were applied the parents of 100 children that were 3-6 years old aged students at A kiddengarden in Bahçelievler/İstanbul. In the direction of results of the Group, subscales of social competence and behavioral assessment calculated as; for social competence, common value 45,81, angriness aggression 20,54, anxiety introversion 19,00 and subscales of emotion arrangement scale were calculated as variability negativeness 31,00 and emotion arrangement subscale 25,00. 20 children that they have lower result than calculated common value and their parents' education level and work positions were taken into considiration according to the demographic form, were choosen for the study. 10 children (5 Boys, 5 Girls) were in experiment Group and the other 10 children (5 Boys, 5 Girls) were in control Group. Play therapy, which was developed by Axline (1947), was applied 8 season on 10 children in experiment Group individualistically. Any practise were not made with control Group. At the end of these 8 season, participants of these two groups were asked to fill up social competence and behavioral assessment scale and emotion arrangement scale again. Pretest-posttest model was used in this study. At the same time, intergroup model was also used to score the differences between experiment Group and control Group. Play therapy was discussed as independent, social and emotional development based variables. There were used non-parametric analysis because received datas from the research questions (n=20) were not corresponded with parametric statistics suppositions. In the analysis of thesr datas, frequency analysis, descriptive table, correlation analysis, Wilcoxon sign test and Mann Whitney U test were practised. According to the comparison results of the experiment and control groups' social and emotional development scores, social competence (U= 6.00, p<.05), angriness aggression (U= 9.00, p<.05), anxiety introversion (U= 10.00, p<.05) and variability negativeness (U= 4.50, p<.05) scores were discovered markedly differenciated. In this research, as mentioned in discovery part, it can be seen that play therapy has an effect on children's social adaptation and emotional awareness levels.