Often times people ask me, “what does music therapy do?”. The answer to that is so broad, I could probably talk for hours. However, in a lot of my sessions we work on academic goals. For example, identifying colors and/or numbers, building sentences, or working on pronunciation. Each client’s goals are different, so it really just depends on what he/she needs at that time. Although, since identifying colors and numbers is a common goal, I decided to incorporate that into my intervention for this month. Since Valentine’s Day is coming up, I hid different hearts in a picture and it’s up to the client(s) to identify how many they see. To add another layer to the intervention, I made the response the same 7-word phrase. It’s up to the client to fill in the number of hearts and the location of where those hearts are found. If needed, you could make this more difficult by asking the client(s) to write in the number and/or location. Or if you need to make it a little simpler, you could have the location already filled in and just stick with asking the client to identify the number of hearts or leaving out the location all together. I have a need to incorporate slower pronunciation, so I clap to each word of the response. There are a lot of different ways to implement this intervention, I hope it’s helpful in your sessions!

Sara Chigani, MA, MT-BC