Music Therapy Thursday

Today was the last formal day of the spring break therapy experience.The day started off as usual with me waking up at 6:30 and us leaving the church at approximately 7:30 am. We sat with Veronica and talked a little bit about our experience here at the Rise School. She also wanted to take a few group pictures of us to put on their Facebook page and main website, so that was exciting! Also, today was my turn to lead the pink classroom of 6 month to 1 year old children.

Here is the order of how my session went:

Hello Song - Same as the past two days.
Brown Bear - I used the book Brown Bear to work on color recognition and animals. To help with the colors, I utilized sign language with the children since they are still nonverbal at this age. It was cool to see that some of the children who knew this book well were able to predict what animal was coming next. One of the kids in particular was doing the sign for "dog" and started bouncing up and down when he realized the dog picture was about to come. It was just awesome!
Shape Drums - Even though they are too young to tell me the name of certain shapes, I wanted to expose them to the shapes early so when it comes time to be able to recognize and identify shapes, they will have already experienced them. I used three different shape drums (triangle, circle, and square) and had the children choose between two of them to play on. We then sang a song about that shape and I showed the drum to each individual child before moving on to the next child. The process repeated until every child had a chance to participate.
Animal Mania - My last application before saying goodbye was a song about animals from the zoo (and some farm ones thrown in there as well). I had colored and laminated visuals to lay on the floor in front of me and also had puppets to use for tactile stimulation with the children. When I picked an animal out of the bag, I would rub it against the child's face, arms, and/or legs to allow them to have the stimulation since some of the children have sensory issues. It worked really well and I saw the excitement on the children's faces as we talked about each animal and what sound they made!
Goodbye Song - Same goodbye song that I did for my other sessions.

This class was so adorable. It's not an age that really gets to utilize music therapy as much as it should, so I had never had a musical experience with infants before. It was very eye opening to see how much it can help and how much they actually can participate at that young of an age. I absolutely loved this age!

At the end of the day we talked about the paperwork involved with Veronica's music therapy and how she does her assessments. She showed examples and told us about the IMTAP and other therapeutic assessment plans. At KU we have a very rigid and strict paperwork style that we have to follow, so it was very interesting seeing another person's way of doing it (I liked hers better actually...).

Stay tuned for tomorrow where I explain my deep feelings about this trip and experience with the Alternative Spring Breaks program!