School – Week 12

Hide & Seek: This game was definitely a hit across the majority of my classes. There was one person as the seeker and one person as the hider. The seeker stood at the front of the room with his/her back facing everyone (eyes closed, too!), then the hider took an egg shaker and walked somewhere in the room, shook the egg, and hid it somewhere. I made sure they were shaking the egg right before they hid it, so the person seeking could get a good idea of where it was in the room. Once the egg was hidden and the hider returned to his/her seat, the seeker had an opportunity to look around for the egg shaker. If it took the seeker a little while, I allowed the class to give hot/cold hints to help out a little. Some adaptations are to do this with two rounds: first one is just the egg shaker, and the second is an egg shaker and wrist bells. I also had some kids pair up, with each team listening for a different instrument sound to really work on teamwork. Otherwise this intervention works well for attention to task and following directions.

Drum Circle (Cont’d): So a few months ago I went to a Drumming & Autism training led by Jim Donovan. He demonstrated some really cool drumming interventions that I was really excited to incorporate with my kiddos, since I was already doing drum circle work with them! At the time, this class was especially having difficulty with some of their relationships/group cohesion, so I was hoping to use drumming to develop some positive interactions and relationships. One game I used from the training used the concept of “The Wave.” First you go around and everyone plays just one hit on their instrument. Then you incorporate what he called a “flurry,” which is just a quick drum roll. Then you can add passing it with eye contact, doing it backwards, adding vocalizations (names, animal noises, opera singing, random sounds, foods, literally anything!). I also like to add funny faces, and something I incorporated for this class was compliments, so they each went around and said something nice about the person sitting next to them. I also asked if they wanted to send anything around — I think at one point we did jokes. But this activity is super flexible for adaptations! It creates a safe environment where everyone can be silly, and also engage in positive interactions.

Boomwhackers: Jim Donovan also showed us some interventions with boomwhackers at the training. With my class, we did some call & response rhythms using different sounds (tapping the floor, tapping them together, tapping our legs), and then one thing I learned at the training was having the students close their eyes and listen to the different sounds and try to repeat my patterns with their eyes closed. Of course, I did not force anyone to close their eyes — I only offered for them to do it if they felt comfortable. Then I asked the students to play the boomwhackers in a scale as I pointed to the letters on the board. I previously worked on chords with this class, so we started building chords and doing different progressions with the boomwhackers. I’d like to try some sort of ensemble work with them some day but haven’t gotten around to it yet!

Ask-It Basket: This is an intervention I used a few times when I was in a mental health facility during my internship. I got the idea when I observed a drug and alcohol rehab group. The therapist asked everyone in the group to write down a question they had and put it in a basket. He then pulled each question out of the basket and the group talked about them. I adapted this idea for my patients, and ultimately used it here at the school for my older students. I gave each student a slip of paper and asked them to write something that was on their mind that day. I collected the slips of paper and redistributed them randomly to the group, so each person had someone else’s paper. Then I asked each student to read the slip of paper they had from another person and pick a song from my list for that person. I went through and played each song live, and I asked each person how they chose that song for that person. I also said at the beginning of the activity that if anyone felt comfortable sharing their thoughts on the song chosen for him/her, they certainly could, but I did not force them. This is a nice way to encourage some group cohesion, positive interaction, and empathy.

School – Week 11

Rhythm Squares: To set up this rhythm game, I got two white pieces of posterboard and divided them into 4 quadrants. Then I drew quarter notes, half notes, eighth notes, quarter rests, and half rests on index cards. I taped the notes to form different rhythms in each of the boxes, making sure that both posters had the same rhythms. I also put a piece of velcro in each quadrant, and then I took two yellow circles I previously made as tokens for another activity and put the other half of the velcro on the back of those. I asked for two students to come up to the board and gave each of them a token. Then I played one of the rhythms on a drum and the students raced to put their token on the correct rhythm. I’d usually ask the class who was on the right rhythm to keep everyone engaged. This one was really a hit across all my classes — even some of the students who initially said, “I’ll try it but I won’t be good at it,” found some enjoyment out of it. There was just enough of a competition to keep the kids having fun, but not fighting or getting upset over winning/losing.
Credit: Rhythm Squares. I would love to try this game as she actually describes it in her post, but I wanted to come up with an indoor activity, and the idea of the kiddos running didn’t really appeal to me, haha. But I might try it one day during the school summer program!

Grocery Rhythms: This activity I did with my younger classes, mostly. I took strips of paper and wrote different foods on them (mostly from my actual grocery list). I ended up with 1 syllable words (quarter note), 2 syllable words (2 eighth notes), 3 syllable words (2 eighths + 1 quarter), and 6 syllable words (4 eighth notes + 2 quarter notes). I put each rhythm on a paper plate, and the students’ job was to sort the foods on the correct plates. Even for my younger classes without much rhythmic knowledge, they were able to be successful in this activity by sorting by the number of syllables. Then I had them “go shopping” and pick 4 foods. Each person got a turn to play the rhythm of those foods on the drum. I almost made up a rap to go along with it, but never got around to it. Some kids added their own words, like saying “I like to eat” before they started and things like that.
Credit: Musical Groceries. You’ll see here that I took my own twist on this idea, but this is also a great way to go about it.

Pass the Ball: This was just a simple intervention I used with my younger classes. I put on some popular music and we worked on feeling a steady beat by passing a ball around. We started with slow songs (like Radioactive) and gradually worked up to faster songs (like Can’t Stop The Feeling).
Credit: I saw my supervisor use this once in a session.

Carnival of the Animals: For this intervention, I printed out cards that had each animal represented in Saint Saens “Carnival of the Animals.” Each student got a ziplock bag with the animal cards in it. They laid the cards out and listened to the music to guess which animal was being played. We also talked about certain qualities of the animals that were represented in each piece (e.g.: the cheetah was fast, elephant sounded like it was stomping, kangaroo sounded like it was jumping, turtle was slow, etc.)
Credit: This was also a suggestion from my supervisor that she used while she was at this facility!

Drum Circle: I started working on drum circle activities with some of my older classes around this time. I used Kalani’s Let’s All Play Our Drum to start the group, and then I used his Orbit – II game. First I did this by just sending one pattern around, and eventually I tried layering patterns at the same time. Layering the patterns was pretty tricky, so sometimes I stopped the group to process what we could do to make it easier. Some ideas they came up with were only paying attention to the person in front of you, making eye contact, and tuning me out (hello problem solving!). I’ll talk about more drum circle interventions that I learned at a training in my next post!

– Arianna (: