anxiety is one common disorder during childhood. in curing anxiety disorders, there are different types of psychological remedies, pharmotherapy, family therapy, and music therapy that can improve the individual’s anxiety, but we need some other remedies to improve social and emotional relationship and interactions. considering the importance of curing the anxiety disorders, the effect of sand play therapy in reducing anxiety in elementary school children is conveyed in this study. true experimental design was used in this study, having a pretest-postest and a control group. the participants in this study were chosen among the girls of the primary school students in babol. 40 students from hefdah shahrivar and bahonar schools who had anxiety disorder voluntarily participated in experimental program. participants were randomly selected and assigned to two experimental and control groups. they had 10 thirty minutes sessions of sand play therapy twice a week. the data collection was done by using spense anxiety questioner that include six dimension, panic-agrophobia, separation anxiety, physical injury fears, social phobia, obsessive-compulsive factor and generalized anxiety. data were analyzed with multivariate analysis of variance( mancova). the result showed that there is a significant difference between sand play therapy and reduction in anxiety, and sand play therapy has some effects in reducing anxiety in children and also reducing the symptom of panic-agrophobia, separation anxiety, physical injury fears, social phobia, obsessive-compulsive factor and generalized anxiety. working with a sand tray will probably give the child the opportunity to discover his phobias in a safe environment, make them concrete by reproduction of the incidents, have more knowledge about them, and find some solutions to solve different problems