Back to School: Our Bag of Tricks

Published by Lyndie Walker , MT-BC at August 9, 2017

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Hello, friends!

It’s already August and time to start preparing new interventions for our school classrooms this year. While we’re always searching for fun and exciting ways to meet academic goals, we have a few items that we ALWAYS carry in our classroom bag of tricks. These items include shakers, scarves, books, miscellaneous instruments, music games, fidgets, and a bluetooth speaker. Most recently, we’ve added a travel PECS binder to take our visual schedules with us wherever we go. Read on to learn more about how we use these items and where to find them!

Singable books: Regardless of our theme for the week, we always carry a stack of singable books with us. We are especially thankful for Barefoot Books, who have given us a plethora of amazing resources to help us work on a wide range of skills. What’s more, our kiddos LOVE these books. They have wonderful visuals and almost all of them include a CD and notation for how to sing or play them. The Barefoot books featured in this photo (and three of our favorites!) include Animal Boogie, We All Go Traveling By, and Driving My Tractor. Just click on the book title for a direct link to the YouTube video! And, be sure to look back at our previous blog post for details on the actions we use for We All Go Traveling By. Pete the Cat song and picture books are also a big hit with our early childhood special education classrooms. Some of them are set to familiar tunes with a special lyric twist, which always keeps our kids interested and engaged. Lastly, we have Ain’t Gonna Paint No More. This is a fun and colorful rhyming book that we use especially for body identification. So cute!

Shakers: We never leave the office without our bag of shakers. We usually keep at least 8-10 sets in each bag, and sometimes more for bigger classrooms during the school year so that each child can have one in each hand. We like these because they have handles, which undoubtedly prompts palmar grasping. There are a ton of different gross motor movements that we do with these, and most often we like to ask the kids how they want to move their shakers. These movements include up high, down low, rubbing our tummies, tapping our shoulders, tapping our knees, rubbing the floor, tapping the shakers together, rolling, and tapping our toes. This is also extremely successful for goals such as following directions or peer imitation. Click on the link to purchase your own shakers, or stop by your local music store and ask for some chiquitas! Some of our favorite songs to use with shakers include Shake Your Sillies Out, Shake it Off, I Know a Chicken, and La Cucaracha. Most often, we sing the song multiple times and change the movement each time. For example, during Shake Your Sillies Out, we also sing tap your sillies out, rub your sillies out, etc. We’ve also created some original songs just for shakers, but we’ll save those for another time!

Scarves: This handy-dandy item is also a necessity for heading back to school. Just like shakers, we are never without a bag of colorful scarves. Our most recent go-to song has been Rocketship Run by The Laurie Berkner Band. Click on the link to go to our detailed blog post from June featuring this super adorable intervention! This is another great tool for accessing a variety of different gross motor movements. We also like to use it for goals such as decision making, following directions, body identification, color identification, peer modeling, and more! Other songs that we have adapted for this activity are Scarf On My Head, Baby Bumblebee, and Move Your Scarves Everybody. Again, asking the children how they would like to move their scarves is a sneaky way to get them to be more involved in the group, making decisions and critically thinking.

Music games: Most music therapists (and parents, too) become very skilled at turning everything into a game. It’s not uncommon for children, or any human for that matter, to become bored very quickly…especially with the rapidly expanding world of technology that we live in today. Most of our games include some sort of visual component, requiring kids to match or identify objects. The first game that we like to play is Old Dog Blue. Look back at our previous blog post for the sheet music and chords that we use! This is perfect to get kids thinking about their colors and animals, working on matching, turn taking, and fine motor skills. Another game that our clients love to play is Down by the Bay. You can download the visuals that we’ve made to the song here. We typically use this to get our kiddos thinking about rhyming words and animal identification. We always pass out a visual to each child and sing through the song, asking who has matching items, what rhymes with bear, etc. Let me tell you, they think it’s hilarious! Those are just a couple of music games that we incorporate for our groups, but there are so many more possibilities!

Instruments: We’ve invested in quite a few unique and exciting instruments over the last couple of years, but not all of them fit in our travel bag. We play lots of instrument passing games so that no fighting is involved! Each kid gets a turn to play each instrument. Some of our favorite instruments include hand drums, quack sticks, stir drums, cabasas, clatterpillars, and bells. We’ve got quite a few original songs to accompany our instrument passing activities, and we’re working on notating them for you as we speak. In the mean time, we also love to use the song “I’m in the Mood” by Raffi. Here is a modified version of the lyrics:

I’m in the mood to play today, hey how about you

I’m in the mood to play today, hey how about you

I’m in the mood to play today, playing along with you

Hey, hey, what do you say, I’m in the mood to play today

Hey, hey, what do you say, I’m in the mood for that

After singing this once through, we sing a little transition song to prompt the passing of instruments and it goes like this:

(to the tune of If You’re Happy and You Know It)

Pass your instruments to the left, to the left

Pass your instruments to the left, to the left

To the left, to the left, to the left, to the left

Pass your instruments to the left, to the left

Fidgets: A small compilation of fidgets will always help you meet any unexpected sensory needs of the kiddos you work with. This past month, we did a blog post with all of our fidget go-tos. Find it here! It’s best to be prepared with a little bit of everything. We take things like stress balls, wacky tracks, bubbles, chewies, and other random tactile objects. Our newest fidget is the mermaid pillow. If you’ve never seen these, you have to try them! They are mesmerizing for any age. We found out just how awesome they were at Wahode camp when we had to set timers for everyone to take turns. Who knew?

Parachute/Stretchy Band: As I’m sure you know, the kids go crazy over the parachute. This is perfect for gross motor movements, motor control, decision making, and an abundance of other skills. We use both live and recorded music, prompting the movements to follow the speed of the music. This provides for a great opportunity to let students choose songs that we aren’t familiar with. One of our favorite live songs is a spin off of “I Wanna Be Like You” from the Bare Necessities. Here are the adapted lyrics:

ooo oo oo – I wanna shake like you – oo ooo

I wanna shake like you, shake like you do

You see it’s true – oo ooo – I wanna shake like you – oo ooo

I wanna shake like you, shake like you do

andddddd STOP!

Each time we sing this song, we will ask a student to decide how they want to shake the parachute, and adapt the lyrics accordingly. For example, if Johnny says he wants to shake the parachute fast, we would sing:

ooo oo oo – I wanna shake like Johnny

I wanna shake really fast, shake really fast, too

You see it’s true – oo ooo – I wanna shake like you – oo ooo

I wanna shake really fast, shake really fast, too

anddddddd STOP!

Bluetooth Speaker: If you ever use recorded music, a bluetooth speaker will make your life so much easer. As a business, we have an account on Spotify that we use to access thousands of songs at the touch of a finger. This is an invaluable resource, mainly because there are only so many songs that a music therapist is capable of learning…and sometimes you just can’t replicate certain music. These come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and prices. Take your pick!

PECS travel binder/visual schedule: One thing that’s been on our wish list is a mini travel PECS binder. We like to be organized when we can, especially when it comes to visual schedules for kids. This helps everyone know what to expect next as well as how many activities we have left before goodbye. We make most of our PECS using Boardmaker, but know that it isn’t always a reasonable option. Here’s a link to a cheaper option with lots and lots of pictures to fit your needs!