Although we’ve been apart since March, our Spectrum community has continued to use the creative arts as a way to stay connected. We have been so impressed with the resilience and creativity we’ve seen in our students with this transition, and thought this was a perfect time to renew our popular “Student Spotlight” series! Each week,
Tutorial 3: Power Rock Tuning For students with motor limitations, adaptive tunings can make the guitar more accessible. If a student is only able to play using their dominant hand (or one hand), usually open tuning is the way to go. Once open tuning is mastered or explored, I find
It's that time of year where we pay tribute to the most important ladies in our lives! Moms, Grandmas, Step-Moms, Mom-in-Laws.....we salute you! This original song was designed to help our students find some thoughtful ways of sharing what mom means to them! Setting Up for Songwriting One of the lyric components of
For a bit of inspiration for vocal warm-ups or songwriting, why not turn to quotes or proverbs? The variety available is endless and can fit almost any topic or need. Quotes can be short, long, inspirational, powerful, humorous, motivating, and more. They can instantly connect you to a famous person, author, movie, book,
One of my favorite music therapy consultation jobs was pushing into a Science class where a student with autism was being integrated. I would gather information from the teacher about different topics and then create an experience for the whole class to do. One class centered around the classification of animals into the 5
In this song, the “Wishing Tree” represents our heart’s desires. What would you wish for if you discovered the Wishing Tree? I encourage my students to select a word that is important to them from a list of inspirational words like: love, friendship, wealth, courage, creativity, happiness, understanding, support, faith, wisdom. Then there is
Grab you ukulele! It’s time for a little “Small Talk” with our friends. I wrote this song for a group working on social skills. I wanted participants to practice asking each other questions and learn how to respond to those questions with a to-the-point answer! So to bring that short and concise visual to
When designing Suzuki tone chime sessions, I am always looking for different ways to use the tone chimes to focus on specific group and individual skills. For some songs, players will follow a powerpoint on the TV, for other songs players will read a specialized notation of the song in their tone chime book.
Paraphrasing, or the rewording of something written or spoken by someone else, is a great skill to learn. Often a deeper meaning of the work is achieved through the basic steps of paraphrasing. I have found this to be an exciting songwriting technique when working with individuals with special needs. Often my students have a
Sometimes it's easy to fall into a rhythmic rut and reuse the same styles and rhythms over and over in your song creations. Want a fun way to create new rhythms in your songwriting process? Select 3-5 songs you currently are enjoying listening to. If you have an iPod, you can simply go to your
