Article by Emma Franke, CTC Volunteer
We’ve been sharing music videos on our Facebook page, which can be a great way to engage your child in a new way during quarantine.
Check out Music Mondays on Facebook!
“Therapy looks a lot like play,” says Katie Schripsema, occupational therapist at Children’s Therapy Center. While helping a child achieve developmental milestones and address sensory processing challenges, one of the great tools in an OT’s box can be music therapy.
“I love to incorporate music therapy into the OT side of things,” says Schripsema. “I like to do a lot of body awareness songs that have tactile inputs that alert the brain to different parts of the body – head, shoulders, knees and toes, for example. Music can be a really good influence in getting speech and communication going as kids listen to words and sing along.”
Schripsema’s Music Monday videos have been getting great engagement on CTC’s Facebook channel. “I use household materials that almost everyone would have (a washcloth, a comb, socks, scarves, pots and pans, a favorite stuffed animal) and think about how kids can move and copy what I’m doing. That’s been a really fun way to still reach kids over a screen but try to make it active.”
These videos can be helpful in getting kids to work on the way they move through their environment and communicate. “People sometimes hear therapy and think of a medical model, but with the kids we work with, we think about making new skills fun, and one of the great tools we can use is music.”