Good-Bye Songs for Children with Special Needs
Hey everyone welcome back to The Rhythm Tree, my name is Ryan Judd, I'm a board certified
music therapist, here to give you some more great tips and ideas on how to use music to
help children with special needs.
The topic for today is a goodbye song, how to practice farewells and saying goodbye through
music.
I posted a couple of weeks ago a hello song and now it's time for the goodbye song.
So I had my own goodbye song that I wrote and actually I'm going to show a clip of it
at the end of this that's from my DVD.
It's straight from the DVD and you can see how I use this goodbye song with these children
that are in the video and I give these big pauses for the kids at home watching the DVD
to fill in the pauses, so that's one of the points I really want to make.
You need to leave those big dramatic pauses right where you want the child to say goodbye.
And lets expand a little bit here doesn’t just have to be saying goodbye, could be waving
goodbye.
It could be giving a high five goodbye.
It could be having an AAC device [00:01:10] an alternative communication device there
for them to push a button that's programmed to say goodbye.
It could be having one of those cool big max switches and hitting that every time that
comes up in the song.
So there's so many ways whether your child's highly verbal or nonverbal to use this.
And I also incorporate look and say goodbye, because we really want to make sure that the
child's not pulling the ol’ goodbye, and start looking down at the floor or off in
the distance, we really, at least for a brief moment make a little bit of eye contact when
we're using these farewells.
So I wrote a goodbye song, just for you that's easy to remember because as usually I put
it to a familiar melody and this one is to the melody of happy birthday.
What I like about this melody is, it's pretty calming and mellow, it's in 3/4 time so it's
got this nice kind of waltz feel to it and usually with my goodbye songs, I don't want
to leave the child all riled up as I hand him off to his teacher, his or her teacher,
or his or her mom or guardian, I want to try to end the session on a nice soft note that's
a little more grounding and calming.
So that's why I chose this particular melody for a goodbye song.
So to the tune of Happy Birthday, here it goes:
It is time to say goodbye It is time to say goodbye
Just look and say goodbye Just look and say goodbye
And then you could put the child's name in there:
It's time for John to say goodbye It's time for Jen to say goodbye
It's time to look and say goodbye Let’s look and say goodbye
Lots of variations you can play with the words, I was playing with them a little bit there,
just improvisation you try to fit some of that in.
But having the child's name's great.
Putting that look and say goodbye those big pauses, with the big inhale.
So if you haven't signed up for my newsletter yet, please do.
I've got a link right below, that will give you some more great stuff, I'll elaborate
upon all this stuff I'm talking about right now in my next newsletter.
I send it out every two to three weeks.
And also, check out this next clip from the DVD it's a great clip I think you're going
to really enjoy it.
Thanks so much for tuning in.