Story Telling and Playing Stacking Blocks Effective in Reducing Children Anxiety in Early Childhood Education

Childhood is period of life full of joy and energy. However, at this time there are times when children face events that make them feel fear or anxiety. One of the main causes of anxiety in children is when they entering Early Childhood Education (ECE). Anxiety that occurs in children has impact on body as emergence of psychosomatic reactions or symtoms of physical disorders due to psychological problems. In some children, this psychosomatic responses in the form of bed wetting, sleep disturbances, headaches, stomachaches and it can be worse like vomiting to fainting. There are several methods that can be done to reduce anxiety, namely the story telling method. This study aims to determine the effectiveness of story telling in reducing anxiety levels in early childhood. This study is a randomised control trial (RCT) conducted for 1 week on pre-school children in a playgroup consisting of 18 students in RA Qurrota'Ayun Kepanjen Malang Regency East Java by measuring their anxiety. The results of the analysis showed that there was a significant difference in anxiety between the two groups, but the story telling group had a greater effect in reducing children's anxiety levels. The value of the story telling group was 1.60 (1.838) and the p value in both groups was 0.000. The conclusion of this study is that Story Telling is more effective in reducing pre-school children's anxiety when entering Early Childhood Education.