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Posts Tagged ‘Hearing Impairment’

The Power of Silence

Filed Under : Early Childhood,Hearing Impairment,Other Special Populations,The Therapeutic Process by Natasha Thomas

Nov.1,2012

It’s a quiet day here at home – I’ve officially caught the annual Fall bug going around and am sitting on my couch with tea on one side of me and oatmeal on the other. Luckily I had a “mental health day” scheduled for tomorrow anyway, just appears my body couldn’t wait to get in on the action and stay home a day earlier!

I make a habit of scheduling the occasional “mental health day” or a day just for M.E. (remember that post? click here for details on those initials!) because time has shown me, along with various physical ailments, that my body and mind need recharge time in between the hectic hours I spend on the road or working with clients, as so many others in my field do. We’re “helpers” by nature, we want to be there for the individuals we serve, and sometimes that means running ourselves ragged to do it. But I was reminded in a session last week how important just taking a break can be, not just in my day to day schedule, and not just for myself, but for my clients, and in my very sessions too.

Many of my students at the North Dakota School for the Deaf have Cochlear Implants. For those of you who don’t know how Cochlear Implants work, they are made up of two parts: one is an internal metal piece that’s surgically implanted in the recipient’s skull, the other is a transmitter that connects magnetically to the plate from the outside of the head behind the ear. Without that external transmitter, the individual is totally deaf. I have preschool students with implants who will take them off during tantrums and put their hands up over their heads to cover their eyes and where the magnetic piece would attach so they can’t hear or see my instructions, which can make a person feel pretty powerless (and tantrums are all about power!), but alas, I digress…

Some of my students with Cochlear Implants have other disabilities as well, which can make the process of receiving and living with an implant, and the auditory stimulation it brings with it, very difficult. One such preschool student last Thursday came into their group session with me very upset – crying in a way that I knew was beyond a tantrum. They were legitimately upset, and scaring themselves – you could see the fear in this student’s eyes, and it broke my heart. Their teacher said to me that the student had recently gone in for an appointment to have the volume of what they were hearing through their implant turned up, and the stimulation since returning to school, it seemed, was too much. So much in fact, that mid-Hello song (even without my guitar, I had opted just to sing to reduce the auditory stimulation) this teacher and student had to leave the room and take a walk, which I should add has never had to happen before with this student. They loved music time, and even on the worst days, I had always found a way to turn their tears around with music. Strumming the guitar in particular was this student’s favorite activity, so I told the teacher that I would come down to the classroom for some one-on-one time with this student after group, that maybe this would help. The teacher told me that she was going to take the student’s implant off for a while to calm them down and that she didn’t think music would be of any use then. I reminded her that music was multisensory, and that the tactile experience of strumming the guitar was at least worth a try. We agreed, and I finished the group music session with the rest of this student’s class in my room, then packed up my guitar and headed downstairs to the student’s actual classroom to try some one on one strumming. And the result was amazing…

When I entered the room, the student was lying on the floor crying softly, without their implant, hands over their ears to block anyone trying to put them back on (which they had long given up doing, but again, when you’re in one of those “point of no return” tantrums, everything seems to be an imminent threat). I sat down in front of them and took my guitar out of its case, and the hands came down from the ears within a second. The student sat upright, and, still crying, reached for the guitar and began to strum. I let the fingers of my left hand form a little chord progression, even though I knew the student couldn’t hear it, but I could see them recognizing when my hand would move, and making little glances away from what they were doing to recognize me, and that was a valuable sign they was aware enough of their environment in the midst of all they were feeling to maybe start to come out of it. The student alternated between strumming themselves and grabbing my hand to strum, crying softly all the while, until a little smile crept across their face and the student lay back on the floor, pulling the guitar onto their lap as they did so, so that when I strummed they could feel the vibration against their stomach. This is a pretty vulnerable position, so I knew we were on to something once the student led me there! I played for a few more minutes until the student turned over onto their stomach so the guitar was against their back. Then they pulled out from under the guitar and grabbed a nearby book and opened it. Across the room the teacher made eye contact with me and just shook her head. Both of us were near tears. As this student engaged themselves in the bookshelf in front of us, I slowly stopped playing and stood with my guitar. The student looked at me as I did this, but continued to look at their book and smile, even starting to make little babbling noises, a sign that I knew the day was returning to normal. I slowly, and again in full view of the student, walked over to my guitar case, put my guitar away, and then left the room silently. When I got to my car, I turned off the radio and drove in silence for a good chunk of the 90 mile drive back to Grand Forks. It just felt right.

Sometimes the world is more overwhelming than we might realize. We are surrounded by sights and sounds that our ancestors might cringe at the sheer volume of stimulation we face every waking moment. What my student reminded me of that day was that even though my job title has the word “music” in it, and even though music might be defined as “organized sound,” that silence is a sound too – and a necessary one at that! It is through silence that we even know what sound is – it’s part of what defines it, what shapes it, and part of what what makes the right sound beautiful and meaningful when it comes through. So, I challenge you in your day to day life to make time for silence – both in your sessions and in your overall schedule. Your body – and your soul – will thank you!

Tags : Arts, Communities, Early Childhood, education, Health, Hearing Impairment, Life, Multi-Sensory, Music, Music Therapy, therapeutic process

Music for Academic Enrichment

Filed Under : Braille Music,Early Childhood,Education,Family,General,Hearing Impairment,K-12,Visual Impairment by Natasha Thomas

Sep.18,2012

One, two, buckle my shoe…

Sound familiar? This little nursery rhyme has been the center of a new unit of mine at both the School for the Deaf in North Dakota and our upcoming programming week at the School for the Blind here in Grand Forks. Why? A few reasons:

1. the Counting concepts involved: this song is great for young children to practice counting from 1 to 10 (and I have a fun verse that goes backwards from 10 to 1 too!) not just for reciting the numbers in order, but remembering that order with interruptions (like the phrase “buckle my shoe” between the numbers 2 and 3).

2. the Rhythm and Rhymes: my students at NDSD find this song a good one for practicing their signing fluency, and I am able to address the issue of rhymes with my older and more aural students. I can show them a variety of cards with pictures of objects like shoes, doors, and sticks on them and say “5, 6, pick up…” and then wait for them to point to the picture of the sticks. Seems obvious to us who know the rhyme, but if you don’t, this can be a tricky concept! My students enjoy playing matching games to songs that rhyme. At the School for the Blind we’ll be practicing playing the rhythm of the song with Braille Music notation, to focus more on the steady “Ta-Ta, Ti-ti-Ta” of the chant, and how that can be expressed on paper.

3. And lastly, impulse control. This can be a fun song to start with singing or signing really slowly, and then speeding up each time you repeat it, but learning to control those giggles after each repeat is a skill we spend our whole lives developing, if you think about it – when something is fun, how do you transition to what’s next without too much disappointment or craziness? This week I’ll be presenting for an early childhood class on using Music for transitions – may be another blog post here on the subject then too!

Until then, however, I have my grandparents in town this week and am enjoying spending some quality family time before Fall really kicks into high gear with the return of my travel rotation with the School for the Blind, resuming of the LISTEN Drop-In kids groups (hopefully the first Wednesday in October – yay!) and the American Music Therapy Conference, which will be coming up sooner than usual this year, and at which I’ll be presenting for my first ever National Conference! Lots to enjoy, be thankful for, and look forward to – much to learn as well!

Speaking of learning, one last AWESOME announcement: this week a new continuing education course by yours truly will be released on Music Therapy Ed.com on the subject of Music Therapy with the Blind and Deaf. Some of the concepts I just discussed above will be included, as well as tons of info on the assessments I use in my work with NDSD and NDSB, and general information on using Music with individuals who are Visually Impaired or Hard of Hearing. I could not be more excited about this or grateful to the amazing Kat Fulton for this opportunity, and I hope if this is a population or area of Music Therapy that is even remotely interesting to you that you’ll consider signing up for the course! It’s all online, available to you 24/7, and worth 5 CMTE credits. It’s been an awesome experience creating the course and I look forward to hearing from students as they take it and seeing what they have to say about it – as much as I teach and advise in my profession, my clients and students teach and advise me every day!

So go out there and learn a little something new today – even better if you do it with music!

Tags : Arts, Braille Music, Communities, Early Childhood, education, Events, Faces and Places, Family, Hearing Impairment, K-12, Life, Music, Music Therapy, therapeutic process, Visual Impairment

Defining Music Therapy (con’t)…within Deaf Culture

Filed Under : Education,Hearing Impairment by Natasha Thomas

Apr.25,2012

The other day I was introduced to video of a Deaf Rapper, who goes by the name of Signmark, performing at NYU (you can find the video here). In the video, a young Music Therapy student says something that really caught my attention:

“I hope that what [people] get from events like this, is not just knowing that people who are Deaf like Music, but people who are Deaf have this huge culture that we’ve not really understood or paid attention to.”

Many of us have heard the phrase “Deaf Culture”, and thought it just to be a community of people who are Deaf, but that is only partially true. The reason for the use of the word “Culture” is more appropriate than we give it credit for here – there really is a Culture of beliefs and practices unique to the world of people who identify themselves as Deaf that doesn’t exist in our hearing world. As such, interactions may literally seem “foreign” to those of us outside of it, but while I think that may lead some folks to believe that people who are Deaf don’t enjoy the same things hearing people do – music in particular – it couldn’t be further from the truth!

Have you ever heard the phrase “Music is Universal?”

I always like to define my personal take on this phrase to people as, Music is “universal” in the sense that every culture has a musical language, but it is not “universal” in the sense that all cultures use the same language – I believe every culture has its own unique way of expressing itself through music, and that those ways may not necessarily translate between each other in a way that any person from any culture can understand the music of any other one. Let’s apply this to Deaf Culture. In the hearing world, music is something we primarily hear and listen to – the rise of music videos recently (as in, the last 20 years “recently”) have made music something we enjoy seeing too, but overall the music that is popular today always involves a vocalist – we find and identify artists who resonate with us based on the lyrics that come out of their mouths and they way that they vocally express themselves – that is our musical language. In Deaf Culture, music relies less on what we listen to, and more on what we see and feel. Though individuals who are Deaf also look to a song’s lyrics to identify with the artist performing them, they see, rather than hear, the words performed in ASL (American Sign Language) – that is their language. One thing is certain, though, even if a person is profoundly Deaf, they can feel the beat in their own bodies just as truly as someone who is hearing does.

When I showed my students at the ND School for the Deaf (NDSD) the video of Signmark performing with his vocal interpreter, in addition to one of his own music videos you can find here, they first greeted it with confusion. One of them even asked me “How did he learn to sign so fast?” thinking that Signmark was interpreting his interpreter! When I told them that Signmark was Deaf, and that he was the one being interpreted, the students reacted with such excitement! Here was an artist they could officially call “theirs,” someone who not only came from, but shared with the world, their culture in just as cool a way as all the artists they had heard of day in and day out in their mainstream schools, but had long struggled to understand.

So, what was my role in all this? As a hearing person, I first of all recognize that I will always be on the fringes of Deaf Culture – someone who is very close to it, but still truly on the outside looking in. So, I see myself and the Music Program at NDSD as a bridge to help close the gap between my students’ existing musical understanding and the culture of music that exists both within and outside of themselves and their own culture. My youngest students start with extra time spent learning songs like “Twinkle Twinkle” and the “ABC’s,” songs that are so familiar to us growing up, but that teachers and parents often avoid with children who are Deaf because they think they won’t get anything out of it – but they do! There are so many academic concepts included in music, and no matter how profound the hearing loss, children still enjoy the feeling of a beat. You can sing the song while they hold a hand to your neck to feel the air forming the sound of your voice, or tap a beat on a drum that they can feel and share in the making of music to as well. The older my students get, the more we focus on the phenomena of music itself, how artists have helped shape the history of our country and the cultures within it, including Deaf culture. Learning about artists like Signmark are good for us hearing folks too, to recognize how far people who are Deaf have come and struggled to be recognized as having the same creative and intuitive prowess that any other person has, as they’ve always had, but haven’t always been recognized. It’s humbling to say the least, but it’s a lesson anybody can learn – you can never assume that the people you interact with in this world, no matter their ability or disability, have or don’t have the same understandings as you do – that’s why the constant pursuit of knowledge and creative expression is so important.

To that end, it’s been my exciting pleasure to be on what I consider to be a Continuing Education Cruise, with lots of presentations this past month (and more to come!) on Music Therapy in the field of both Visual and Hearing impairment – it’s been a pleasure to share with events like the Dakota Chapter AER conference and the ND School for the Blind’s Family Weekend this past Saturday, talking to people about what Music Therapy is and how it can help them, and I look forward to sharing more in places like Kat Fulton’s Music Therapy Ed, which debuts July 1st (and you better believe when that website opens, I’ll be there taking a class or two as well as teaching one!) It’s the true mark of a good field when it requires those who practice it to be constantly reinforcing and building their education with continued coursework and proof of progress. It’s my joy to be able to say I choose a good one!

In the next few weeks, we’ll look more closely at some of my work with Adults who have Developmental Delays and Family Music Groups for Infants and Toddlers. Until then, if you’re in the Grand Forks area, stop by 12 Houses for our Drum Circle Saturday, April 28th, at 7pm, or come take in a family-friendly, full costume and lights performance by 12 Houses Bellydance May 11th at the Firehall Theatre – if you aren’t in the area, take in a live performance or active music making experience near you – even better if it’s a little something you hadn’t heard of before!

Tags : Communities, education, Events, Faces and Places, Hearing Impairment, Life, Multi-Sensory, Music Therapy, social skills

Loopy Stanley WORLD Premiere 2012!

Filed Under : Hearing Impairment,K-12,Other Special Populations,Social Networking,Songwriting,Studio Music,Technology by Natasha Thomas

Mar.16,2012

I am SO excited for today’s post I’m just going to cut to the chase here – Loopy Stanley is finished! Over the past month and a half, Music Therapists from around the country have inquired in response to our original video , where North Dakota’s School for the Deaf students made music with my Ipad as the start of a project to have various Music Therapists and their students contribute to a song without ever meeting or planning their contributions beforehand. Of all the inquiries, 4 instrument submissions were delivered by Music Therapists Carly Litvik of Sacramento California and Rachelle Norman of Kansas City, Missouri, featuring themselves and their students on the Tambourine, Gathering Drum, Saxophone, and Oboe. You can check out the Loopy Stanley WORLD Premiere by clicking on the image below – Enjoy!

Click here to view the Loopy Stanley Premiere!

By the time Music Moves readers view this, NDSD students will have just had their own premiere during their usual Music Therapy time this week. They have been so excited for this and so grateful for the submissions we had! It’s a busy time of year, to be sure, and we know many more MT-BCs wanted to participate, so after the many inquiries surrounding and beyond the submissions we received, I’ve made the decision that Loopy Stanley will become an annual project – we look forward to seeing more artists join us next year! Very special thanks for Carly and Rachelle for their submissions in this maiden voyage for Loopy Stanley and his crew from NDSD – who knows where the next Loopy Stanley will travel? Maybe you’ll find him in YOUR area!

Tags : Arts, Communities, education, Events, Faces and Places, Family, Health, Hearing Impairment, K-12, Life, Mental Health, Music, music games, Music Therapy, Social Networking, Songwriting, Studio Music, Technology, therapeutic process

Groovin’ with the Deaf & Blind

Filed Under : Dance,Hearing Impairment,Movement,Other Special Populations,Visual Impairment by Natasha Thomas

Feb.25,2012

Hard to believe February is almost over! This is a week of many transitions for the places I serve, shifting from our Winter Weather focus forward into Spring, though in North Dakota we take our time with this transition – I believe we’re supposed to be getting a blizzard this weekend? Who knows when Spring will *actually* arrive!

This past week I got asked to lead a dance unit at the North Dakota School for the Deaf. I had come up with one for the School for Blind about a year ago and found it interesting how much overlap I was able to find while remembering to supplement the different sensory needs in the unique ways each of them called for. For example…

The Cupid Shuffle is my all-time favorite dance to teach to kids. The moves are timed perfectly to the music (there’s no odd phrasing like there is in the Electric Slide, though let me tell you that’s my new favorite sign in ASL) and the song even has places where it tells you what to do, like in the Cha Cha Slide, which is an equally fun song, but much more random (and longer than I remember, I created a chart for NDSD to use as a visual aide, we’re at 9 pages and counting…!) So here’s how it goes, for those of you who don’t know it (and my apologies to those of you who do and are sick of it, I just can’t help myself, I’ll always have a soft spot for these lyrics!):

“To the right, to the right, to the right, to the right

To the left, to the left, to the left, to the left

Now kick, now kick, now kick, now kick

Now walk it by yourself…”

*Now, the all important question…what can you do with this? *

For Students who are Visually Impaired

This is an excellent song for working on Cardinal Directions. Talk through the positioning of the song first: you start facing one direction, complete the movement instructions, ending with “walk it by yourself,” which means you start walking in place, then rotate 90 degrees to your left. Pause at each turn to ask your students what direction they’re facing now – North, South, East, West? These are things that students who are visually impaired are taught to recognize early on. For those students that aren’t as familiar with those terms though, you can have them dance within a textured mat on the floor and use orientation terms like “squaring off” with the edge of the mat to help them conceptualize a full 90 degree turn (which I encourage any of you readers to try blindfolded, it’s harder than you think!)

For Students who are Hearing Impaired

My students at NDSD also benefited from me breaking the song down before hitting “play,” but for different reasons, they couldn’t hear the song’s lyrics, so they needed to know what beat they fell on. So, each student just stood and felt the speakers while the song played and I signed in time to the lyrics, so they learned that the last word of each instructional phrase (“right, left, kick, and walk”) and fell on the 1 and 3 of each measure. Then, combined with watching my movements without me signing, we were able to keep in time to the music and the movement. This was also an opportunity to talk about dance being one of the social aspects of music, and how they could connect with their peers who knew these songs – it was a valuable experience for my students to recognize they could totally participate in dances that were standard and didn’t have to worry about not hearing the lyrics, once they knew and understood the patterns.

Dual Sensory Students

I talked about students who are Deaf-Blind during my interview with Janice Lindstrom of the Music Therapy Show, which can be found here. I have a small number of students on my caseload at the moment who qualify for both Hearing AND Vision related services. None of them is totally Blind and Deaf, as Helen Keller was, but each of them has the need for even more tactile response than my totally Blind or profoundly Deaf students. For those students, I allow them to stand closer to me to hear what they can or see what they can from a tighter distance, and I allow them to physically hold portable speakers or tactile maps of our movements to follow along. Moving within a smaller room or space can also make activities like dancing more enjoyable for a student who is Dual-Sensory impaired. The more potential for things to touch and (safely) bump into, the better!

This week at School for the Deaf, I also got to share with our students that we got our first Loopy Stanley response in the mail this week! As February ends, so does our deadline for outside participation, so we hope to see more from folks soon! In the next week, Music Moves will have it’s first EVER guest post on the site while I prepare Loopy Stanley for his public debute, so I hope you’ll keep it here for what I already know is gonna be an AWESOME post from an AMAZING Music Therapist!

Until then, get your groove on this weekend! I’ll be enjoying a laid-back dinner with family before shakin’ & shimmying at at a friend (and fellow Bellydancer)’s Birthday party – who knows, maybe the Cupid Shuffle will get played there too!

Be Musical, Be Well.

Tags : Arts, Dance, Hearing Impairment, Movement, Multi-Sensory, Visual Impairment

Why Music Therapy Matters

Filed Under : Adult Wellness,Advocacy,Education,Family,General,Hearing Impairment,K-12,Other Special Populations,Sensory Integration,Social Skills,The Therapeutic Process by Natasha Thomas

Oct.7,2011

My dad used to tell me there were always two questions to ask about anything: first, what it is, and second, why it matters. Once you know those things, true learning can take place. We talk about many things on this blog, the “what” of music therapy – the many areas of music and wellness that qualified professionals use to help many different populations and kinds of people improve their qualities of life- but I don’t often talk about what music means to ME and why I love my job so much. So, here it is, the “why it matters” of Music Therapy, from my perspective:

1. Music is accessible. Today I attended a performance of Egyptian Music with my students at the ND School for the Deaf. When we got to meet the performers after the show, many of them expressed concern that the students weren’t enjoying themselves because they couldn’t hear it. I reminded them of how multi-sensory music is – the performance took place in an elementary gymnasium with all of us sitting on the floor, so not only the volume but the sensation of rhythm through the floor was very present, and the kids enjoyed seeing instruments they’d never seen before and learning about a culture they’d never before experienced. This leads me to my second reason why Music Therapy matters:

2. Music brings people together. Just as music is capable of being experienced by anyone, anywhere, music can also unify people. At one point during this morning’s performance, several students were chosen from the audience to play a little rhythm section along to one song. A student from NDSD was selected and given a basic rhythm in 4/4 time that I walked her through counting in her head before the song started, and then sat back to watch her work. In those 3 minutes she was not a deaf child – she was just a child making music with her peers. They were all equal, and they were all loved by the people watching them perform, attention you could tell they relished throughout the rest of the day, attention that every individual needs from time to time to feel valued and nourished.

3. That leads to my 3rd reason why Music Therapy matters and why I love my job. Music is inspiring - there are things I see my students and clients do to music that they don’t do with anything or anyone else, and it is so moving to be there when that happens. I feel honored and humbled in the presence of these great moments because I realize that I am only a small part of the equation – the power of music is in the tool itself, I just have the training to safely and effectively wield what has essentially always been there.

Below you’ll find a little clip of just one such moment with a student that I think encompasses all of the above things that make Music Therapy matter in my life and the lives of my clients: in the clip, a student and I share in a little musical dialogue after singing a version of “Old Joe Clark” many Music Therapists know as the “Play your Instruments” song. This is a student I’ve had for quite a few years now, and she’s come to expect that song at the end of sessions, but this day we did something a little different at the end, and the “conversation” shared between her and I is something she doesn’t typically engage in otherwise!

Click here to view the clip. Apologies up front for the lack of camera focus at the start – it fixes itself about 10 seconds in…

This is a student that speaks in one to two word sentences and rarely engages in a conversation beyond yes or no answers with another individual. The music here serves as her motivator, inspiring her to communicate with me. The syllable “La la la” that we sing is accessible, it’s easy for her to grasp and repeat and eventually she becomes an equal partner in building the conversational relationship, alternating between responding to me and initiating my responses – I truly wish the video could have gone on longer (the battery cut out halfway through a moment that continued for 10 more minutes) – it’s magical!

That’s what Music Therapy is to me and why it matters – those moments with clients when you are able to communicate without barriers, build relationships, and experience the unexpected. I invite you to do the same, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, in this busy time of year. Here’s what’s going on in Grand Forks this month:

Sunday, Oct 9th: Benefit concert in honor of Mark Solberg, featuring local choirs from the Grand Forks area – click here for more info – come celebrate the life of a student truly motivated by music!

Saturday, Oct 22nd: the next 12 Houses Drum Circle, 7pm at 2017 Demers Ave. Bring a drum or just bring yourself (kids welcome too!) Instruments are available for even the most novice players, come find your own inner musical spirit!

Saturday, Oct 29th: the 3rd Quarterly 12 Houses Hafla, a FREE, family friendly event featuring Traditional and Tribal-Style Middle Eastern dance. This event will be Halloween themed, featuring a Bollywood rendition of Thriller that will be a sure crowd pleaser! Click here for more info – hope to see you there or back here soon for pictures and videos from all these great events!

Told you it was a busy month! Coming up soon on Music Moves: a return to some Practical, Take-Home Tips.

Until then: Be musical, be well

Tags : adolescents, Advocacy, Arts, Autism, Communities, education, Events, Faces and Places, Family, Health, Hearing Impairment, K-12, Life, Multi-Sensory, Music, Music Therapy, Sensory Integration, social skills, therapeutic process

“This is a…” Game!

Filed Under : Adolescents,Education,Emotionally Disturbed,Family,General,Hearing Impairment,K-12,Mental Health,Other Special Populations,Sensory Integration,Social Skills,Visual Impairment by Natasha Thomas

Sep.16,2011

You may find yourself reading this post’s title and thinking “a what?” To which I would reply:

“Exactly!”

In a previous post I mentioned that I was a kinesthetic learner – I learn by doing. As you may know, there are other ways of learning too: visual, auditory, kinesthetic – we all learn differently. Today I’d like to share with you a game I like to use to teach a variety of concepts (like rhythm and following directions) that is accessible to each of those kinds of learners. I call it the “This is a…” Game! Some of you may know it as “This is a Pen” and have learned it at a Theatre Camp like I did. In essence it is a verbal passing game like telephone that is carried out by one person turning to the individual next to them, interacting with a message that gets passed around a circle, but instead of just one phrase it’s a whole dialogue that goes like this:

“This is a pen.”

“A what?”

“A pen.”

“A what?”

“A pen!”

“Oh! A pen!”

The person asking the “what”s then turns to the person on the other side of them and initiates the same dialogue, and so it passes around the circle. I like to start with this original incarnation of the game and then move to just playing the dialogue in rhythm, like this:

This is the rhythm we would use to play/say these phrases on a Drum

First we all play it together on our drums (or sticks, or whatever instrument we like, but all of us on the same one), then we start the game again, with one person playing the rhythm to their neighbor. This can be done to achieve a variety of goals, such as:

1. Waiting and Following Directions - this is the most important part of this game – everyone can’t play all at once! You have to wait your turn and listen for the rhythms being played to you.

2. Eye contact – looking at your neighbor so they know you’re “talking” to them – this is big for my teenagers and students who are Deaf – even those that are Visually Impaired learn to turn towards individuals they are speaking to.

3. Boundaries/Expression of Comfort Level – sometimes I will have students tap the rhythm they intend to “say” to their neighbor on that person’s drum. This can be a really uncomfortable thing for some people, so I ask that they tell their neighbor what level of playing on their drum (edge, center, or not at all) they are comfortable with. If everyone is comfortable playing on each other’s drums as well as having their own drums played on, the game can actually become more of a motor challenge and produce many a good laugh!

4. Focus – the next level of this game is to have more than one person in the circle starting the dialogue at the same time. This can only happen if Eye Contact, Listening, and Boundary control is consistent across the circle. Eventually you can build up to everyone playing both dialogues back and forth – if you do this by playing on each other’s drums, it can be quite fun!

5. Concept Development - at the School for the Deaf in North Dakota, not every student is able to successfully participate in Music Education, so concepts like Quarter Notes and Eighth notes are not well understood. This month I’m focusing on introducing the basics to my Middle School students there, and today we used this game to cement our understanding of how to notate rhythms. I showed them the rhythms first, then we added the dialogue.

So… there are lots of ways you can play this game, even backwards as I did in Music at NDSD today! You can check out the original “This is a Pen” game and other games like it in the John Fierabend Book of Echo Songs – they’re great fun across age ranges and ability levels. Try a game of your own today!

Like the games in this post? Check out some of my other favorite musical games.

Tags : adolescents, Arts, Autism, Communities, education, Emotionally Disturbed, Faces and Places, Family, Health, Hearing Impairment, icebreakers, K-12, Life, Mental Health, Movement, Multi-Sensory, Music, music games, Music Therapy, social skills, treatment, Visual Impairment

Back to School at Music Moves! My Session Planning Process

Filed Under : Education,Family,General,Hearing Impairment,K-12,Mental Health,Other Special Populations,The Therapeutic Process,Visual Impairment by Natasha Thomas

Aug.20,2011

Hello all!

In case you’ve noticed a lag in posts recently, my husband and I just enjoyed a fabulous trip to the East Coast to reconnect with Family (blog-worthy subject matter there abounds, let me tell you!) and upon our return last Saturday I went straight into planning for the coming School Year, already upon us – Summer always seems to go so fast! Here I find myself with a moment in which I’d like to share a little part of my job I like to call “Formula Building.”

Roughly three times a year (at the start of the School Year, over the Holidays, and just before Summer starts) I pause my regular service schedule to completely break it down and determine what’s working – both for my mental health and physical well being – and make adjustments. For instance, at the start of last year I inadvertently scheduled myself so tightly I couldn’t have lunch until 2pm on Mondays – I tried to power through with snacks galore and threw my whole digestive system out of whack for one day a week until I came to my senses and solved the problem by moving my 11:30 session to the hole left at 2pm – Duh, right? I’m a kinesthetic learner: I have to do things and think them through in a thousand scenarios (often screwing them up repeatedly) until I can work them out most efficiently. This year in particular, with my recent health issues and the cementing of my status as a permanent employee of the ND School for the Blind with salaried hours, a good amount of math is involved, and it takes careful planning to ensure that I give NDSB their required hours and serve all the other clients I see while leaving time for Grad School and “Me” Time (not to mention time with my husband) – no small task! Color coding and Microsoft Excel have become my best friends. I love being able to click on a box, label it with text, select a color to highlight it with, and then physically click to move that box wherever I want to explore different scheduling options. Once my schedule looks and sounds doable (I will literally sometimes read my schedule aloud to myself and others around me, occasionally stopping to to say “ok, that sounds crazy, let’s revisit that idea” to make changes) I print and place physical copies all over the place: in a notebook I carry around, in my phone, on my office door, on the fridge at home, all so that I know where I’m supposed to be and those I work with and love know how they can find me (or when isn’t a good time to call!). I’ve always been a stickler for communication, and when it comes to my schedule, I’m doubly particular. I want to ensure at all times that I’m maintaining a healthy balance between myself and my time, but that’s not to say other people’s time and well-being doesn’t factor into my scheduling as well – I always want those around me to know that I take their needs to heart. That part of my planning is most evident on a session-by-session level.

I’ve talked before about how I see all of my clients as individuals. Once I’ve worked with them and their families/agencies to set up a day and time that fits into their schedules as well as my own, I look closely at their assessments to determine a treatment plan. Saved in my computer are templates – based on the many populations that I see – of session “formulas,” or ways that I structure my sessions and activities most efficiently to address the common symptoms and skill sets of certain disabilities. For instance, there is a template for my work at the School for the Deaf that includes activities meant to strengthen the reading of body language and following visual cues. These are not areas I would address with my students at School for the Blind, where my template reads more with hearing and improving reflex responses to auditory stimuli. Any student can fall within those gradients, or require a template made just for them, so I may temper a few activities from one template with activities from another to create something that works for the individual, but I find that my session templates generally help me get started when I’m determining where to go with a new client. Here’s an example of a Session Template for my Elementary students at the School for the Blind:

Activity #1: Hello Song

Activity #2: Scarves (waving and dancing for more mobile or less sighted students, visual tracking for less mobile students or those that have some vision)

Activity #3: Listening (this might be me asking them to identify an instrument they hear by name, or finding someone with a specific instrument in a room where everyone is playing something different)

Activity #4: Playing (we might all play the same instrument or different ones, in pairs or small groups, or all together, with instructions on when and how to play throughout)

Activity #5: Goodbye Song

Note that the above session template contains NO goals, only activities, and the things we might do with them or people we might do them with. The goals come well before the Session planning process during that time I spend reviewing the client’s assessment (I talk about my Goal-Writing process here in a previous post), and they are tailored specifically for the individual’s needs – but even those come from templates, or examples of how a person with a certain disability *may* behave or excel. There are many checklists and charts out there depicting those milestones individuals need to achieve throughout their development, and I refer to such documents often for ideas in my goal-writing. Where is the client excelling? Where could they use a little support? And then I look to my Session Templates to trigger ideas for how I can help. From my Templates I have Binders with resources I’ve compiled over time and a whole Internet (oh boy!) filled with songs and activities I organize into Themes (like “Back to School” or “Winter Weather”) that I can harness to fit the Template and Client Goals. From there, I let go – I take my plans into the session with the client and I let go. I do not expect anything: good, bad, or otherwise, I simply present that which has worked in the past (or that which shows promise towards aiding in the achievement of client goals, and I work with my instincts and training to read what is and isn’t working to reevaluate throughout the session and adjust as necessary. So I suppose you could scratch what I said earlier about pausing 3 times a year to break down my schedule, because I guess if you think about it, I break it down everyday!

So, what good does this do you as the reader? What can you take from this? Hopefully I’ve helped you to gain a little perspective on the planning that goes into the Average Music Therapist’s Year, and maybe even given you a few tips for organizing your own life. I’d be interested to hear how some of you plan and prioritize – what’s YOUR process? Even if you’d rather not share it here, think about it – whatever you give attention to has a way of giving some back to you. You may find in looking at your life that there’s something more IT can give YOU! Take advantage of those gifts this week! In fact, if you’re in the Grand Forks area this coming Saturday (August 27th), come on downtown for the end-of-the-summer Drum Circle on the Greenway, hosted by 12 Houses. We’ll meet on 3rd Street on the same side of the tracks as Widman’s Chocolates (me with the drums as usual, though you’re welcome to bring your own – and a chair – if you’d like!) and we’ll walk over the Greenway together to play by the river. As with last month’s circle, we will drum indoors if the weather gets iffy, and I’ll make that announcement here – no matter what, it’s sure to be a good time!

Be in Harmony – Be Well!

Tags : Arts, Communities, education, Events, Faces and Places, Family, Health, Hearing Impairment, K-12, Life, Mental Health, Music, Music Therapy, Terms and Definitions, therapeutic process, Visual Impairment

Making Music with the Deaf

Filed Under : Education,General,Hearing Impairment,K-12,Other Special Populations,Sensory Integration,Uncategorized by Natasha Thomas

May.11,2011

Over the 2010-2011 School Year I began working with a selection of Middle School Students from the North Dakota School for the Deaf on a song. When I tell people this, they tend to look at my blankly as if to say behind their eyes “You’re joking, right? How on earth can Deaf students sing?” I usually follow-up such blank stares by answering the implied question with “we’re learning to sign along to a song.” This can be done either on its own (there are deaf rappers and other performing artists to present their own material this way, in a completely visual form) or it can be done to live or recorded music. In the case of my students at ND School for the Deaf (NDSD), we are working with a recording of Katy Perry’s Firework, which in part looks a little like this:

Firework in ASL (translation below literal text).

Now, before you click the above link, you may be wondering, “Why is a translation needed? I can hear what the words are, isn’t she just signing that?” That answer to that is actually no. American Sign Language (or ASL) is it’s own language, with unique syntax that we don’t use in spoken English. I actually had to submit a copy of the original lyrics to our school interpreter to get the result you see in the above video. No ASL dictionary alone could have helped me make sense of the lyrics for these students.

Another question you might be wondering is, “Isn’t there an actual sign for a ‘Firework?’ Why sign ‘unique individual that shines’ instead?” The answer to that question is that while there is in fact a sign for the word “Firework,” students who are Hearing Impaired are often also Language Delays, meaning metaphors like calling a person a Firework just don’t make sense. So, my students actually had to spend about a month just delving into the lyrics of Katy Perry’s song just to figure out what the darn thing meant before we could even begin signing it. We started with watching the original music video (which was actually quite helpful, what with the special effects creating fireworks exploding from all the character’s chests), then we played a matching game. I held up photos of plastic bags, card houses, and other images used in the lyrics, and then recited a series of scenarios about people who felt lost, shy, vulnerable, and asked the students to match each scenario to an image. Once we’d made sense of how a person could feel like a plastic bag or a house of cards, then we could begin signing. However, some individuals who are Hearing Impaired don’t need that much homework to understand a song. Again, as I’m always saying, every individual is unique, and with them come unique needs. I’d encourage you to just search for “Firework in ASL” across Youtube and see how many different interpretations you come up with, for just as one singer will sound different from another, visual interpretations and signs used for songs may vary across populations as well, and you most definitely will see some interpretations that choose to use the actual sign for “Firework” in place of breaking down the metaphor as we did for my students.

What other ways can Music be used with students who are Deaf or Hearing Impaired?

One of the first instruments the ND School for the Deaf purchased me was a gathering drum. We have great fun playing on that large circular drum, both with mallets and with our hands. I encourage students to watch and echo rhythmic patterns, feel the vibrations of the drum against their knees and the floor, and practice starting and stopping on time together. It’s a great opportunity to work on issues like impulse control, and social interaction, both of which can often be difficult for a child with a Hearing Impairment.

I also see Preschoolers at NDSD, and we use movement and dance as part of our Music Therapy sessions frequently! It’s a great opportunity for them to work on impulse control as well as social interaction and motor coordination.

The world of Deafness and Music is vast, moreso than even I knew before beginning my work with NDSD. Check out the website for the Deaf Performing Artists Network (D-Pan) for cool videos of other songs in ASL performed by Deaf Artists, or Google the Rock Band “Beethoven’s Nightmare,” or Percussionist Evelyn Glennie to see footage of actual Deaf Musicians playing live! Truly tremendous things are possible through music, regardless of your ability to hear it. Who knows, after a video or two, you might feel like signing along too!

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Tags : Arts, Communities, education, Events, Faces and Places, Health, Hearing Impairment, K-12, Life, Music, Music Therapy, Sensory Integration