In my last post, I shared fun and creative ways to enhance the quality of your musical presentation and gave some challenges for you to implement those ideas in your sessions right away. How'd it go? Remember, our musical presentation is so important in music therapy. Music is the tool we are using to bring [...]
Our musical presentation is so, so important in music therapy. Music is the tool we are using to bring about therapeutic change. Thus, we want our musical presentation to be high quality and engaging. This means we need to have strong musical skills on a variety of instruments AND be able to create musical accompaniments [...]
I was going to close out this Musical Mini-Series by going straight to a wrap up, but yesterday something happened in one of my sessions that I just had to share with you. I was working with one of the classes at Children's Resources Educational Center (a school for children with special needs here in [...]
Ready for Part 3? This is the third post in the musical mini-series where we're a closer look at our therapeutic medium: music. We started off by taking a glance at melody and the V7 chord. Next up is....(drumroll please)....tempo! How can we as music therapists use tempo to guide and elicit movements? When working with a [...]
Last week, I introduced you to the mini-series I'm starting that focuses on our therapeutic medium: MUSIC. I'm excited to jump in because I want to take a look at a few musical elements and examine how they're functioning to bring about positive changes in behavior. I'll also dig into how enhancing our musical presentation [...]
If there is one thing I love to do, it's session plan. I cozy up on my blue rocking chair, pull up the blinds so I have a good view of the palm trees outside, and get out a fresh sheet of blank paper. Then I get to work planning my upcoming sessions for the [...]
Do you ever set musical goals for yourself? As music therapists we are master goal writers! We assess our clients, create functional goals and objectives for them and track those goals throughout treatment. Have you ever thought of going through that same process for yourself, musically? It's something that is top of mind for me [...]
Back in January I posted about My Musical Goals. I decided this is my year to step it up musically so I can enhance the quality of my music therapy sessions. Here's my update on how things are going... My January Goal was to Become a Ukulele Master. I found some great websites, including Ukulele Tricks [...]
Now that the new year is in full swing, I've had some time to think about the goals I have for myself. In my post, Patience, Productivity, and Presence, I talked about those 3 words in more detail and how they will guide me through the new year. Regarding my goals for myself, I'm taking [...]
