Music Therapy - Tuesday

Alright, so today was the day where we had the opportunity to either lead entire music therapy sessions on our own, or co-lead them with Veronica. Since I am already in music therapy practicum, I felt comfortable leading an entire session without help so I had the blue classroom! Let me just say this now, it was the most fun I have ever had in a music therapy experience, and I'm really looking forward to working with the red classroom tomorrow!

The blue classroom was for 2 years old children, some typically developing children but with a majority of special needs children. I created my own session plan with activities I have been wanting to try with kids but have never had the opportunity to do.

First, I started out with Veronica's "Hello Song" to keep some consistency since a new face would be stimulating enough and already might put some children in an uncomfortable environment.

My next activity was "Bumblebee" where I had a bee puppet on my hand and the class sang "Baby Bumblebee" together. After each time of "I'm bringing home my baby bumblebee..." I added a section to work on the buzzing sound and articulation. During the buzzing, I flew the bee puppet around the room and "stung" a child! Now they got the chance to have a leadership role by flying the bee around and choosing another classmate.

The next activity I did was "Colors." During this application I had all the colors of the rainbow, ROYGBV, as egg shakers. I would ask the group to tell me what color I held up and then had the children stand if they liked that color. For the children that did stand, I asked them what something they knew was that color (for example, for blue I asked if the sky/water was blue, if my hair was blue, etc.) -- my hair is not blue, by the way! I did that for about four different colors and then noticed my time was running out quickly!

For my final activity before saying goodbye I wanted to do an activity that incorporated the classroom's theme for the week: spring cleaning. I had pictures of items that help with cleaning (mop, broom, paper towels, soap, etc.) and also had pictures of items that does not help with cleaning (shoes, flowers, apple, scissors, etc.). For each child, depending on their functioning level, I would have either two or three options for them to choose between. Some children I asked which item does not help clean (i.e. between soap and apple) and for some children I asked which item did help clean. If the child was very high functioning, I gave them two correct and one incorrect and they had to tell me which was did not help clean and vice versa for other kids. Once they chose the correct answer, they got to play the drum while we sang about their success in a song I piggy-backed for this activity.

By the time I got to every child, it was time to go so I was not able to do one more really fun activity I had planned. So instead, we went to Veronica's "Goodbye Song" and finished the session. The children thoroughly enjoyed their time with me today, and I had a blast too!

All of the other group members got to lead sessions in other classrooms as well, and at 11:30 when we were done for the morning Veronica gave us feedback about what we did well and how we could extend or adapt each application for different experiences and for different ages. It was very refreshing to have her ideas as now I can incorporate them into my music therapy back at KU and hopefully be really impressive to the supervising team! For tomorrow, I volunteered for the red classroom, so be excited to hear about my adventures tomorrow! I know I can't wait to work with them and see some new activities in action :-)

Stay tuned!