One thing I see over and over again with music therapists (both students and board certified clinicians) who work with teens, is the use of songs and activities that are geared toward children. And let me tell you - I get it. I talk in the Tune In Teens E-Course and the Tuneful Teens E-Books [...]
Have you ever had a time when you were going along, leading your session, and suddenly realized that things were totally out of control? Kids were screaming, people were wandering, and no one was following your instructions? Insert hand raising emoji here. I've been there. We've all had moments where it's a runaway train and [...]
Thanksgiving break is here! While this is an exciting time for our students, it can also be confusing for them. Schedules and routines change, things are different. So, I wrote a song called "See You Soon" to remind my students that we may be on break and our schedules may feel strange, but we'll be [...]
Today I'm wrapping up a series on successful arts therapy collaborations (something that was pretty new to me!) Check out Part 1 of the series here and Part 2 here. I'm going to continue sharing themes and experiences from the 8-week Healing Arts Program I facilitated for a high school autistic support classroom here in [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
