Thoughtful Thursday: {Self Care}
December 10, 2015Wordless Wednesday: {Lifeworks Holiday Performance}
December 23, 2015
Post by Alexa Rosenbaum, Toneworks intern
With each new month comes a new theme in our ECSE classrooms, and December’s just so happens to be one of my favorite things-food! There are a multitude of songs about food out there, but not all of them can be easily adapted for group music therapy settings. Luckily, the wonderful ladies of Toneworks have written many blog posts about activities and songs related to food. Below I have listed the 5 food related interventions that I find myself using most often in the classrooms, and I have provided links to all of Lyndie and Andrea’s past blog posts plus added some fun tips of my own!
1) We’re Making Soup Today -This post recommends using visuals of different vegetables, but this activity also works wonderfully with scarves. We just pretend that different colored scarves are different soup components (red tomatoes, white onions, orange carrots, etc.) and stirring the scarves is a fun sensory experience as well!
2) Today is Monday -This is a book that I’m sure many music therapists know and love, and is perfect for working on sequencing and short term memory recall. However, I have found that some of the animals and food choices (roast beef?) aren’t very familiar for our younger clients so I like to have clients make their own weekly menu and we draw it out on either a whiteboard or a piece of paper. This gives the clients some ownership over the finished product and they have an easier time remembering a yummy food that they chose.
3) I Had Some Apple Seeds-We like to do this song in our classrooms with a visual of a tree and various different fruits that kids can identify and place onto the tree. After they have chosen a fruit, we sing the song and do the movements that are described in the post. Once we have planted all of our fruits, it is fun to go back and remember who planted each fruit an reinforce the names and colors of the fruits as well.
4) Popcorn -This one is such a classic and I don’t think kids get so excited about any other activity that we bring for them. We use small pom poms as pieces of popcorn and clients have so much fun anticipating the popping that they don’t even realizing they are working on self-regulation and waiting!
5) I Went Walking Through the Store -Although this post describes this song in the context of a community helper theme, it can also be used with food. We happened to have some plastic fruits in the office, but any type of food could be used with this activity. First I pass out one fruit to each child and we all tap our knees and sing “I went walking through the store, through the store, through the store, I went walking through the store, what did I find?” Depending on the age and academic skills of the group, you can name a fruit or give hints such as the color of the fruit or the letter it starts with. Once the correct fruit is identified, we put it in our shopping cart (a drum) and continue to walk through the store.
