music, therapy, and me

One of the things that I enjoy is developing therapeutic music experiences (TMEs) which happens to be the term that I like for what I do with my clients during sessions. Others call these things interventions or applications or modules. I am currently designing TMEs to go along with a book that I bought at Thriftbooks.com. It is my goal to have one book organized with TMEs to go along with it for each month of the year. The first one is getting started, and I am revisiting my TME process and refining it all. So, let's catch up about this. I started writing TMEs (we didn't call them that back in 1989, by the way - we called them applications - I didn't like that term very much, even back then, but I didn't argue) in my second semester of music therapy education. We had to come up with 25 things to do with music therapy clients during the semester. It was rough to create that many ideas, but I did it. I wrote down my ideas on 4X6 inch index cards. I still have them, of co...

I had plans for myself yesterday - an afternoon without sessions where I could do some more organizing of the spaces that I have upended due to a recent ceiling leak. I had plans that were destroyed by a storm two nights ago and slick roads. My afternoon without sessions changed into business as usual - two sessions in the middle of my afternoon. The same groups will be going on their field trip today, but I will only miss one session and will only get 30 minutes of extra preparation time due to my schedule. Sniff. Sigh. Waaaaah! So, I did my actual job yesterday - all of it. One thing I noticed a long time ago was that plans NEVER go exactly like you think they will. I have always thought of session "plans" as more like "strategies" or "suggestions," and I think it baffled some of my teachers during music therapy school. I remember getting marked down for session implementation when I rearranged the session to accommodate client responses and setting even...

I am sure that I mentioned that I brought back an old closing TME (therapeutic music experience) this week. It occurred to me that I had not sung the song for years due to interns being in charge of sessions and bringing their own music into our music therapy culture. Many of my "standard" TMEs have gone by the wayside. Right now, though, there are no interns at my facility. I closed that program in October after having zero applications for a year. For the next year and three months, I am bringing back the TMEs that I love and that my clients have loved over the years. It is time to rediscover things that are long forgotten and to introduce them to my current clients. This week, as I have been encouraging my clients to select their own music interactions through decision making and exploration of the music room, they have been making requests. I currently have requests for using the parachute, using the traffic cones, and using the bouncy balls. Some of the behavioral health...

As I have been going through boxes and bags of things as a result of my recent water emergency, I have been finding all sorts of things that I have purchased and then packed away. These are things that I had been able to justify purchasing at the time, but that I have not actually used yet. So, as a result, it is time to start working on my Six Things Rule again. Just to refresh your memory (or introduce you to this rule that I have created for myself because I tend to hoard things and keep buying more and more things to use), I have established a "Six Things Rule" to help me figure out if I can purchase things for my music therapy clinic. This rule helps me a bit when it comes to impulse buys, but not much because I can think up six things to do with just about anything when motivated. Right now, though, I need to decide if I can keep these things that are taking over my very being and all my space. These bulletin board pieces, for example. I bought some paw print calendar n...

Happy Break for me, folks!! I took a week off from blogging - just because - last week. I have a week ahead of me to rest and work and make plans before heading back to work for our extended school year and an intern interview! Yep, that's right. As soon as I announced that I thought I would close things down, I got an applicant who finished all of my requirements and wants a place in the new year. So, that person is coming up for an interview on day 1 of our summer session - with a new schedule... oh well. That is not the topic for today, though. Today's topic is songwriting, and it is time for me to get some of that going again. I have a weekly reminder set on my work email to remind me to select a topic for my therapeutic music experience (TME) challenge. Here's what that is. I want my interns to complete five TMEs each week for the first four months of their internships. Sixteen weeks times five TMEs equals 80 TMEs for their file - I require 75 TMEs with 25 of them bein...

I teach in a school setting. My clients are not easy to teach and often have aggression and significant difficulties with communication of emotions, wants, and needs. They often have not had many positive experiences in school settings and come to us for specialized special education services. One of those services is educational enrichment music therapy services. Being an educational enrichment therapist means that I see every student for an hour per week. I do not have IEP goals for clients - music therapy is not considered a related service at my facility - I do not have to do eligibility assessments because every student is automatically eligible for music therapy just by being admitted to the school. All of this is just to give you a glimpse into my facility and how I operate before I head into my current sessions. Part of what I do in my sessions is introduce my clients to some general music education concepts because many of my clients have never been allowed to engage with inst...

Yesterday, at this time, I was getting ready to spend the night at my job. About halfway through the day, though, I remembered that my Christmas boxes were supposed to be delivered. I did not want two large boxes to sit on my porch for two days, getting covered by snow, and tempting other people to take them. My father's (and mine as well) cornet was shipped this time around. If I lost that, I would be heart broken as it is something we shared. So, I drove home yesterday afternoon, pulled in the boxes, and decided that I would try to get to work this morning through the storm. I have now decided that I will not be doing that. All of the roads between here and work are completely covered with snow and ice. While I would love the extra sick time, I am not all that willing to risk my life by sliding off roads and into ditches on completely covered roads. It has happened before, and I am determined that it will not happen to me again. So, I now have a day at home without plans. This is...

"Tis the season for holiday hype. Can you feel it? If you are like me, you do everything you can to avoid the stores this time of year because of the barrage of holiday music that bombards you as soon as you enter and continues until you leave. There are messages of consumerism every place you look, and it is sometimes hard to see the original purpose of the holiday itself under all the glitter and tinsel and opportunities to "buy, buy, BUY!" The holiday hype permeates schools. If you are involved with school-aged kids or adolescents, then you know that there is a change in learning ability and interactions between October and January. If you work in a school associated with a psychiatric residential treatment facility for school-aged kids and adolescents, then you know that those changes happen in those settings as well, but the responses may be a bit more pronounced. We are in the last week of school before our winter break begins. Students are finished with school on ...

It is time to update you on my TME challenge. I have finished three sequencing therapeutic music experiences and have the master template finished for two more. This week's challenge is writing coping skills TMEs, so it will be a less visual heavy task this week than last week. I have plenty of coping skills ideas in my books, so I just have to write things up in order to get them into my database. I am working more and more in the areas of making things that are relevant to my client population and other school-based therapy populations. I am hoping to have more free time on my schedule pretty soon, so I want to get into the habit of making TMEs and visuals during that free time. At the moment, I don't have that extra free time, but here's hoping that we can do this really soon. Anyway, it was a late morning for me, so I have to end here. I hope that you have a good Tuesday. Mine should be pretty good. We have five groups and one individual and then a meeting about that fr...

I am horrible with making goals for myself and sticking through with them. I mean, I can write the goals no problem - I do that all the time, but I don't follow through. I am lousy at that particular part of the goal-followed life. So, I try to trick myself into viewing these things as "quests" rather than "goals" to see if it will work better for me. It does, to a point, and then it doesn't anymore. I am currently in one of those times when it doesn't work anymore. Now, I have all sorts of excuses - some good, some not so good. I have a broken finger which makes typing, writing, and composing challenging. I am sick again with the same sort of stuff I had in May which saps my strength and makes me just want to sleep all the time. My brain is stuck in survival mode which means that creativity is pushed to the side in favor of just getting through it all. I am lazy and just don't want to write any sort of therapeutic music experiences right now. I have...

Last week, I did not get any sort of TME production accomplished. If you are a first-time reader then you probably don't know that I am working on writing 5 TMEs per week in an experiment. I ask my interns to do the same thing, so I am examining whether I can do that task. I can, when I bother. I, of course, am navigating all sorts of things including a work-related hand injury which stops me from playing both the guitar and the keyboard for the next month, at least. My TME productivity plummeted last week as I was going through adjusting to my new reality of an awkwardly broken finger on my dominant hand that interferes with my ability to write and type and compose. So, I took a week away from TME development, but I started up again yesterday. I am finished with everything except the actual transcription of the music - again, can't play instruments easily right now... can't even do body percussion with my left hand... That is the part that is the most frustrating right now...

It is finally Thursday. I have only six groups left in the week. That means that we have finished fifteen groups by this time every week. It is no wonder that Thursday usually includes some exhaustion. While we only have four groups today, our day is pretty full - in addition to our four groups, we have two individuals scheduled now. I am not the leader of many of these sessions - I do not have primary therapist responsibilities in our individual sessions and I lead half of the group sessions today. I am spending time this week, during my office hours (non-session time in the music therapy room), writing therapeutic music experiences (TMEs). My goal is to have five finished by the end of tomorrow. I have completed two of the five and have the other ideas identified but not in TME format. I established a new Google form to work in to generate a database in a form a bit different from what I usually do, and I am finding the task interesting. I am a creative person. I create all sorts of ...

One of the things that you may not know about me is that I have written several music therapy session books. I have offered these on my website for many years, but I've decided to add them to my TPT store so others can find them. I put the first one, sing about autumn , on the store this morning. I am not anticipating that many people will purchase these, but I want to get them out there more than they have been out there before. Just so you know, sing about songs  have been my projects for many years. I love writing therapeutic music experiences (TMEs) and sharing them with others. One of my areas of research has been music to support learning across the age range, and I have always wanted to write music for an organization like Sesame Workshop or Fred Rogers Productions. I am fascinated by the way that music can enhance and enrich learning in ways that other pedagogical methods just do not. When I first decided to go back to continue my education in music therapy, I wanted to do...

It is Tuesday, so it is time to write a bit about therapeutic music experiences (TMEs - which is what I call the things I do with clients in our music therapy sessions), and today's topic is things that I have forgotten that I was reminded of during the World Congress of Music Therapy. Let me explain. Okay, I have transitioned into the stage of life as a music therapist where I am considered either "vintage" or "seasoned." This means that I have become a music therapy crone which is simultaneously frightening and satisfactory. So, from the perspective of being an older music therapist, I have found several things that have happened in my way of viewing this profession. For one, I no longer really find presentations all that inspiring. They no longer really share new information in presentations - I am finding that presentations just serve to remind me of concepts and vocabulary that I have forgotten. Even the research seems to be repetitive - we seem to be looki...