Music & Movement Monday: Holiday Music Bingo

Photo via Peter Rimar

One of the places we serve at Toneworks Music Therapy Services is Golden Nest, a small Korean assisted living facility. I (Andrea) am fluent in Korean so all music therapy sessions are in Korean and I use mostly Korean traditional songs and instruments. That said, around the holidays we sing a lot of carols and holiday songs that have been translated into Korean over the years. Since one of the therapeutic music interventions the residents love is music bingo, we thought it would be fun to do a holiday edition.

Goals for the group that we work on during this intervention include peer interaction and auditory perception. Some of the residents are not be able to see or hear as well as others, but the group works as a team to figure out which melody  I am playing on the piano. Residents interact by speaking with each other, listening to peers share memories, cooperating by singing the same song, and helping others as needed. The way we play music bingo at Golden Nest is for all of the residents to “win” at the same time. The facility then provides small treats or prizes for the residents after music therapy is over.

The music bingo sheet can be easily adapted for use with children as well by switching out some of the holiday songs with songs from a children’s artist or from a children’s movie. Parents can also use this at home for a sing along game with children!

Goals for children may include: letter identification, phonics, visual perception, counting 1-5 with 1:1 correspondence, and directional concepts of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal on the bingo board.

I’ve made the bingo sheet available for download on scribd (in English, don’t worry…). There’s an option to download it as a DOCX for those of you that may want to leave out the religious carols or add in songs to represent Kwanzaa and Hanukkah as well. I just happened to make this for a facility where the residents all have a Protestant and/or Catholic background so that determined my song choices.

Happy Music Bingo-ing!

Music Bingo Sheet