Website Wednesday: EducateAutism

It is Wednesday again - a time for looking around the internet for something that I use as a music therapist. 

I enjoy looking for materials, and I especially enjoy talking about the thing that I find. Today's site is EducateAutism.com. 

I was looking for some simple emotion cards that went farther than just the regular "happy, sad, and angry" for my students who are unable to communicate using verbal language. I was also looking for the same cards to represent very different emotions and some nuanced emotional states. The last criterion that I had was that I wanted the visual aids to represent a variety of people - not just the pink people on the basic PECs that I had found at other sites. I wanted some brown folks as well. I found them all at this website...for free! (That's very important to a music therapist working for school pay!!)

Now, I'm pretty picky when it comes to visual aids. I usually start off with a vision in my head, and I either keep searching for what I want until I find it or I go off and make my own. I knew that there had to be some sort of visual out there that would give me the variety of emotions that I needed as well as the convenience of not having to draw all of the emotions myself, so I searched and searched until this site came up. I managed to find everything I wanted and more on this one page.

The site developers are from Ireland (as evidenced by the spelling of some of the words), but the folks who designed the visuals offer both the British English spelling and the US English spelling of any word that is different. (If you are not sure why this is important, believe me, it is VERY important to present words using the correct spelling for the person who learned the words. Just believe me!) The visuals are not too complex, but they aren't babyish either (another important thing to consider when working with clients). There are lots of free materials available that I haven't started to use - I'm thinking about getting the puzzle files and starting to develop different TMEs with those files - but the ones that I have used have been very effective in increasing the communication of emotion with my clients.

I use my sets of emotion face cards in the beginning of the session. Everyone gets a full set of faces to help them choose how they feel. There are 28 different emotions. It is interesting to see what each client chooses. One client always chooses a picture that had the darkest skin tone. Just so you know, all of the sets of emotion cards have the same words, but the skin tones are all mixed up. So, one folder has a light pink person with a happy facial expression and another folder has the same facial expression, but the person's skin tone is brown. Other clients always choose the card that expresses love. Others appear to choose any card in a random manner, but since I try to always presume competence, what they choose is acknowledged and reinforced through our greeting. How can I know that the selection of furious is random? It may very well be true.

I went in search of this site again (I won't make that mistake again - it's back to being bookmarked on my browser) because I need some new cards. Mine are ending their usefulness stage and moving into the "too many uses" stage. It's time to re-do some of the cards. Now that I'm back on the site, I'm seeing some more things that I could be making to use in my upcoming music therapy room. Hmmmm.

I hope that some of you check out this website and are able to find something that will assist you in making your music therapy life a bit easier. That, after all, is the purpose behind this series of posts!

Happy Wednesday, all!