Rap

I can’t believe it – last Sunday was the final day of Friendship Circle for the school year!

Friendship Circle is an amazing program that I’ve been a part of for the past four years. The program provides opportunities for socialization and friendship for children, tweens, and teens with special needs.

I provide group music therapy sessions during the Sunday drop off program, where teens rotate through various activities like karate, yoga, hip hop, art, and cooking.

I wanted to plan something special for the final group sessions of the school year, so I did some brainstorming….

The tweens and teens love hip hop and rap songs, so I thought it would be cool for us to create our own rap…a friendship rap! (The coolest kind there is, right?)

Here’s how we started off creating the Friendship Rap:

1) Since our theme for the tween and teen groups this year has been about building friendships and learning appropriate social skills, I asked them to generate some words that came to mind when they thought about friendship. I thought this would be a nice way to tie up what we’ve discussed and learned this year about friendship. Here are some words/phrases they came up with:

     Friends, always there, cool, buddies, play with us, helpful, understanding, sing together, make music

2) From there I chose four words/phrases that stood out: Friends, understanding, cool and always there

To find out how I turned this into a rap and facilitated the rest of this intervention, check out the Rap Pack for Teens. This resource provides creative ideas for how to use raps to work on variety of goals during your teen music therapy sessions.

Click here to read more about what’s included and to listen to sample beats!

Rap Pack for Teens

 

All in all, this musical experience was a great way to tie together what we’d discussed throughout the year about friendship while working on sustained and selective attention, impulse control, and other pertinent goal areas.

Be sure to check out the Rap Pack for Teens HERE so you can implement this musical experience with your groups!

 

 

Image courtesy of adamr / FreeDigitalPhotos.net