Supplemental Sunday: Anger Monsters
One of my rules is that I can only keep visual aids in my music therapy clinic area when I can think of six distinct things to do with those supplementals. It helps me to preserve the limited storage space I have for things that are relevant to many of my clients. Keeping that in mind, I often make things that don't yet fit the bill. I think I have justified the storage of these monsters - we'll see when I start writing about their therapeutic use here in a bit!
These are my "Anger Monsters." I made them two years ago when I had a bunch of angry, demonstrative clients. They were angry at everything and everyone. None of them wanted to engage in music therapy sessions. They were just plain old angry. One day, I made these.
It was around Halloween, so we started with The Monster Mash. We scattered these monsters around the room, started listening to the song by Bobby Pickett, and stomped on the monsters when we heard the words, "the Monster Mash." We got some really good proprioceptive input through our ankles, knees, and legs and it offered us an opportunity to express our anger by smashing something that really didn't respond or react to the violence of our emotion.
The next step was to rewrite the lyrics of the song to reflect our own anger and other emotions. We still used The Monster Mash to structure our songwriting, but the focus became our own anger rather than the monsters of the song. Everyone adopted a monster to be their own inspiration during the songwriting part of our exercise.
Here's my favorite of them all!
I've used these Anger Monsters to focus our thoughts on change. We sing about our emotions often in my clinic. We also discuss how to change our Anger Monster into a Less Angry Monster. We use these visual aids to structure our improvisations about our emotions. We change our improvisations to reflect the different Anger Monsters. We discuss the differences between anger that is spurred by fear, frustration, sadness, and other emotions - we choose an Anger Monster to go with each type of anger. We then make music to reflect those differences.
That's three distinctly different therapeutic music experiences (TMEs). I've still got three more to go...
Ooh, here's another that I just thought of. We often talk about using music to engage in mood vectoring - changing our emotion through music listening. I could use the Anger Monsters, some music, and some dry erase markers to illustrate this concept. We could start with a Monster, listen to music, and use the marker to change the expression of our Monster to reflect how the music makes us feel. There may be some music that makes us more angry. There may be some music that makes us feel sad. Other pieces may make us feel happier. We could change our Monster faces to reflect our responses to the music presented.
Are you wondering how these were made? They were very easy and made out of things that I have hanging around the house. Each monster was made with a cardstock base. The other materials were more cardstock, white paper, glue sticks, markers, and label stickers. I also used some circle punches so I could get even circles, but those tools are not necessary if you want to make your own Anger Monsters. Just start arranging eyes, mouths, teeth, and eyebrows to reflect different thoughts and emotions. Laminate the Monsters, and you are ready to go!
By the way, these don't have to be only Anger Monsters. They could certainly be Emotion Monsters - just vary the expressions.
How else could you use these Anger Monsters? Let me know in the comments!!
Happy Sunday!
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| Monsters for the Monster Mash |
It was around Halloween, so we started with The Monster Mash. We scattered these monsters around the room, started listening to the song by Bobby Pickett, and stomped on the monsters when we heard the words, "the Monster Mash." We got some really good proprioceptive input through our ankles, knees, and legs and it offered us an opportunity to express our anger by smashing something that really didn't respond or react to the violence of our emotion.
The next step was to rewrite the lyrics of the song to reflect our own anger and other emotions. We still used The Monster Mash to structure our songwriting, but the focus became our own anger rather than the monsters of the song. Everyone adopted a monster to be their own inspiration during the songwriting part of our exercise.
Here's my favorite of them all!
 |
| This is my favorite monster of them all. |
That's three distinctly different therapeutic music experiences (TMEs). I've still got three more to go...
Ooh, here's another that I just thought of. We often talk about using music to engage in mood vectoring - changing our emotion through music listening. I could use the Anger Monsters, some music, and some dry erase markers to illustrate this concept. We could start with a Monster, listen to music, and use the marker to change the expression of our Monster to reflect how the music makes us feel. There may be some music that makes us more angry. There may be some music that makes us feel sad. Other pieces may make us feel happier. We could change our Monster faces to reflect our responses to the music presented.
Are you wondering how these were made? They were very easy and made out of things that I have hanging around the house. Each monster was made with a cardstock base. The other materials were more cardstock, white paper, glue sticks, markers, and label stickers. I also used some circle punches so I could get even circles, but those tools are not necessary if you want to make your own Anger Monsters. Just start arranging eyes, mouths, teeth, and eyebrows to reflect different thoughts and emotions. Laminate the Monsters, and you are ready to go!
By the way, these don't have to be only Anger Monsters. They could certainly be Emotion Monsters - just vary the expressions.
How else could you use these Anger Monsters? Let me know in the comments!!
Happy Sunday!
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