Ideas, Ideas, Ideas
I now have lots of ideas, and it is time to flesh them out into realities. This is fun part! So, I have lots of cutesy clip art that I've purchased, so it is time to start putting my ideas into that clip art pool and then see what comes out of the mixer. I tend to go towards two poles - really cute and really functional. This help with my students - some like the cute, some absolutely do not - so, I can find use in both types of resources.
The things that I want to focus on right now are multi-step and multi-functional activities. I did some work box activities like this for a co-worker who had absolutely no clue how to assemble work boxes, and I found it to be an amazing thought process. Here's how it worked.
Student A started off the task. He had a box that included four different colors of beads, four small, labeled containers, and a pair of large tweezers. His task was to sort the beads into the labeled containers by color, using the tweezers. The educational benefit of this particular task included fine motor skill development and color identification and sorting. (Remember that these were for an educator/co-worker and were not primarily for therapy, though it doesn't take much to turn this into a musical task.)
Once student A was finished, he took the work box to student B. She took out the second batch of materials that she needed to complete her task. She grabbed the second box that included key chain blanks and pattern cards. Her job was to choose a pattern card, and string the correct beads onto the key blank. Her goals included following a specific pattern and working on fine motor skill as well.
Student B finished up her task and took the box to student C. Student C's task? Well, packaging up those finished bead key chains using bags, labels, and price tags.
Now, if these were going to be sold to raise money for our program (they weren't, but they could be), now would be a good time to stop. In our program, though, we then put the work box back into the rotation to prepare the box for starting over. We usually put completed work boxes back into the rotation after a couple of days to illustrate to our workers that their work is important. I would take the projects apart away from the watchful gaze of my students and then reset the boxes with the appropriate materials.
I want to make some things like this for my music therapy clinic...not work boxes, but using this type of cumulative work idea - one person does the first part, the second does the next, and so on. I just have to think about what goals I want my clients to work on, and then figure out a format.
So, using my common brainstorming pattern, I open my mind to ideas for this type of therapeutic music experience (TME). Here comes the word salad -
composition - scale relays - Activity of Daily Living song cards and lyrics - instrument family sorting - instrument packs for specific TMEs (putting a tambourine, a shaker egg, a pair of rhythm sticks, and a set of wrist bells together for a group play TME) - song lyric sorts - blah, blah, blah.
Once the ideas stop coming out of my brain onto paper, I start to think a bit more productively.
One of the things that I want to be part of this multi-step procedure is one task that is error-less. If you have no idea what this means, let me tell you (if you already know, feel free to skip this paragraph!). An error-less task means just that - any way the client puts it together is correct. In the example I gave you above, there was no error-less task. That would be at the end of the process when student D would take the finished keychains and then dump the beads into the box without sorting them. The task cannot be "wrong," and that's the first step that you need when you are using different tasks to teach clients about sequencing and how to finish work tasks. Something that cannot be done wrong. If you are using a file folder activity with a client who has never learned how to use a file folder activity, you want to have this type of task so that the client learns how to complete file folders. A good example of this particular activity would be "Five Green and Speckled Frogs" where the frogs are unnumbered. The goal is to have the client choose a frog and place it into the pool as the song indicates. It doesn't matter which frog is selected and it doesn't matter where the frog lands in the pond - success! Then, you can increase the difficulty and the types of tasks by changing the frogs to different colors (to work on color identification) or to frogs with numbers (to work on number identification) or to add mathematical symbols (to address math concepts). The client has to know what to do before you can make it into something else.
Once error-less concepts have been mastered, you can move into task-specific TMEs. This is one of the reasons that I like file folder activities so much. I like to prepare one folder as a base and then have multiple sets of task cards to use with clients who have slightly different goals, and we all can work on the same task simultaneously! One student has numbered frogs and the other has colored frogs. I can make a frog pond that has both numbers and colors on the lily ponds! So, student E is matching numbers from the frog to the ones on the lily pad and student F is matching colored frogs to the differently colored lily pads. Student G could be matching note names in a more advanced version of this TME. All of it while we are singing together!
One of my favorite things is to make sets that can grow with the student's academic and cognitive development. That's what I want to do in the next week. I'll write more about the procedure tomorrow, and I'll try to get lots of pictures as I go through this task from concept through to project completion. I'll share these in my Teachers Pay Teachers store as well, once they are finished!!
For now, though, it is time to take the cat to the vet for her annual checkup, and get started with this process! See you tomorrow?? I hope so!
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