Welcome
back to The Rhythm Tree.
I hope you enjoyed that clip.
This was a session that I had with one of my clients with Autism who is nonverbal and
we’re focusing on two therapeutic goals.
We’re focusing on finger extension – just extending that pointer finger to touch a key
on the piano.
This is a great skill to work on because it helps a child use alternative and augmentative
communication devices such as DynaVox, Springboard or even an iPad where there’s small, little
picture icons that they need to touch.
If they go with all fingers or an open hand, they reach for it with that, it is not going
to be effective and it is not going to work.
We also worked on signing more.
With both of these, I want to point out that I stopped the music to create this tension
and to motivate my client to communicate or hit that key on the piano in order for the
music to get going again.
Whether you’re a musician or not, this is a great way to reach goals.
If you’re not a musician, you can figure out what a child or adolescence favorite song
is or some of their favorite songs, use those and pause in the middle of the song and then
that’s the moment when you can work on them responding whether that’s using signs, words,
communicating or it could be something different like hitting an instrument or doing something
else in order to get the music going again.
The great thing about this is that you can do it multiple times within one song – lots
of repetition without the monotony.
You might have noticed when I follow my client’s lead – we’ve talked about this a couple
of times in other clips.
I was actually expecting him to go for piano but he signed ‘more’ and then I incorporated
that into the song and I started singing about him saying ‘more’.
This can be another great technique whether you’re a musician or not.
You can take a simple melody, ‘Twinkle, Twinkle’, and if a child does something
you want, you can say...
“Jenny, Jenny, she said “more”.
Jenny, Jenny, she said “more”.”
Something simple like that can be a fun way to reinforce responses that a child is making.
Please, tune in again.
Next week, I will post another video and keep following me on therhythmtree.com.
Thank you.