Last month, I started a series on successful Creative Arts Therapy Collaborations. You can check out Part 1 of the series here, where I shared ways to incorporate dance and art experiences into your music therapy sessions (for example, by pretending to surf to songs by The Beach Boys and doing chalk drawings of outer [...]
Over the past few years, as I've expanded the age groups I've worked with and the variety of settings I've worked in, I've found more and more ways to incorporate other creative arts into my music therapy sessions. I began my career working at United Community Options (UCO) Miami, where I collaborated with speech, occupational, [...]
Therapist. Client. Two well defined roles. But what happens in music therapy when you switch up those roles? When the therapist feels what it feels like to be the client, and the client feels what it feels like to be the therapist. This idea came to me a few years ago when I was working [...]
I recently participated in the Adams County Library's FunFest. Doesn't the name FunFest just sound like a good time? It really was. FunFest is a free event hosted by the library system that celebrates the kick-off of their summer reading program. Community organizations and businesses host vendor booths with activities for children and information for [...]
Last summer, I moved back to my hometown in Pennsylvania and it still feels like a dream come true! My kiddos get to play soccer on the same fields I did, attend the same school I did, and go to the same library where I used to check out Baby-Sitters Club and Goosebumps books (90s [...]
Are your clients and students as into Encanto as mine are? I don't know about you, but I constantly have "We Don't Talk About Bruno" stuck in my head! Over the past few months, I've found some creative ways to work the wonderful music from this movie into my sessions in a therapeutic way. Here [...]
Today, I did an entire refresh of my Music Jeopardy game for teens. I updated all the songs for the Name That Tune and Finish the Phrase categories, and all the artists for the Name That Singer and Name That Style categories. I do a refresh like this every few weeks, since the music that's [...]
Over the past few weeks, I've shared some posts that've hopefully boosted your creativity if you work with school-age clients or teens. In this post, I showed how to therapeutically use songs that don't appear (at first) to have therapeutic value. And here, I shared how I keep things age appropriate (and cool!) when working [...]
One of the primary things I keep top of mind, when planning my sessions for teens, is age appropriateness. It's top of mind for me because I understand how tricky planning age appropriate experiences can sometimes be, and it's something I get emails from other music therapists about all the time. We may work with [...]
In music therapy, the music is what we use to captivate and engage our clients so they can work on attention goals, social goals, communication goals, or whatever the goal areas might be. But as music therapists, we have to find and use the music that our clients actually like. That music might be Drake, [...]
