Monday Music Therapy Group

The music therapy group arrived in Houston, TX yesterday evening. I joined them at the Rise School this morning for our first day of the experience at 7:30 am. For the first 30 minutes, we met with Veronica, the music therapist for the Rise School, and she just told us about herself, the program, and gave a basic run through of what her schedule looks like each day. We also introduced ourselves and told her what we were looking forward to (more about that later).

Veronica then took us on a tour of the facility - we saw the classrooms, the instrument closet, the play area for gym/dance, and the 5 therapists' office they share. The rooms are all color coordinated by age starting from 6 months to 6 years (pink-purple). With all of the nitty gritty stuff done, we got to experience what we all came here for: seeing the music therapy in action!

First off, we started in the pink room (ages 6 months to 1 year) at 8:30 this morning. As all of us were just observing today, we got to see how a typical music therapy session is run in Veronica's life and what kind of applications/goals & objectives she works on with the children. It was a common thing across the board to utilize the same hello and goodbye song for each classroom. Not only does it allow for a sense of familiarity as the children grow up, but it also makes the music therapist's life a LOT easier to only have one song used in 6 different sessions!

Oh, this is probably important to mention. The Rise School is an integrated school for special needs and typically developing children - so there is a high percentage of each classroom that have Down Syndrome, Fragile X, or Autism Spectrum Disorder.

The second room, green (3 years old) was at 9 am. The structure of the music therapy ran the same as it did for the first room and ran the same as all consecutive sessions in the other classrooms. A typical session, that we saw today at least, ran like this: hello song, color recognition, surprise (usually related to the theme of the classroom for that week), gathering drum, pinwheel, goodbye song. If time ran out, one or more of the applications was not used, but it really depended on the flow of that specific classroom.

Third was yellow (ages 18 months to 2 years). Nothing different here. Next was purple (ages 5-6 years). Following was blue (2 years old). And finally, we finished off with red (4 years old). This order of classrooms is consistent every day, in 30 minute increments (even though the music therapy sessions only lasted 20 of those minutes).

Everything was done by 11 am. This gives the therapist and team time to assess what happened during the sessions, plan for the next day, and figure out what went well or what could be improved upon to help the children. During this time, Veronica gave each of us a classroom (well, we volunteered for the room we wanted!) and she walked us through deciding what applications to do and was just a person to bounce ideas off of. I have the blue room, so be prepared for some really awesome pictures and notes in tomorrow's blog!

I absolutely loved today - well, will the music therapy aspect! This is definitely the population I want to do my music therapy internship with and work with for the rest of my life. Kids are amazing, and I just absolutely love love love love loved my experience at the Rise School today. I'm looking forward to seeing what the rest of the week entails!