UTC students Seth Moulton , with guitar, and Kennedi Walz engage with students in the Telehealth Groups for Children with Special Needs program.
Playing drums is one of the special-needs students’ favorite things to do.
Max doesn’t speak much. Never has.
The 16-year-old isn’t mute, although his vocabulary is limited. As a special-needs teenager, he mostly speaks in single words at a time.
But he loves to drum with his bare hands.
A few weeks ago, he began working with the music therapy program at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, a student in the newly created UTC Music Therapy Telehealth Groups for Children with Special Needs. He pounds drums, rattles egg-shaped shakers filled with beans, jingles a handheld strip of small bells and twirls an orange scarf with gusto.
“He loves it,” said his mom, Mindy. “He’s like, ‘music therapy’ and ‘drum,’ and I’m like, ‘Yes, we’re going to go downstairs.’ Because, I mean, even though he’s nonverbal, he says basically single words. And so you can tell when he’s happy and you can tell when he’s sad, but he’s like, ‘drum, drum, drum.’”
Telehealth focuses on 10 special-needs kids and teens, giving them instruments to play while music therapy students guide them. Their homes range from North Georgia to Maryville, Tenn., so sessions take place using the Zoom computer program.
“That way they’re able to do what we’re doing in just 30 minutes while they’re 90 minutes away, and they’re going to be successful and they’re going to get the full therapeutic experience,” said Katie Goforth Elverd, who created the music therapy program at UTC.
“Part of what makes music therapy really successful is that the tools that are being utilized, a.k.a., the music, is highly motivating and it intrinsically drives those behaviors that we don’t see outside of music therapy,” she added.
For every session, three UTC music therapy students take lead, talking to the kids——the official word is “clients”—getting them to drum fast and slow, to shake tambourines, to wave colorful scarves around their heads. Most importantly, though, the clients are engaged in the lessons, listening to instructions and talking, however limited, with the student-teachers. “Nice job!” and “Thumbs up!” are frequent phrases.
As a music therapy major, Kennedi Walz said dealing with the special-needs kids and teen gives them an extra “trick in our bag for later on.”
“We have had this opportunity and not many people have.”
It’s also fun, said the UTC students, which include Seth Moulton and Mary Record.
Part of the process is asking questions such as “What’s your favorite thing to do?” “Who’s your best friend?” When the clients answer, even if it’s only a single word such as “burgers,” “ketchup” and “green,” that word is used as a lyric in an upcoming song.
Other lyrics include “I wanna see you be brave,” “It’s gonna be the best day of my life” and “It’s time to say ‘hello.’”
Mindy is surprised at how engaged Max gets during his classes, including the question-asking parts.
“The girl was asking Max, ‘What do you want to talk about Max?’ And I thought, ‘He’s nonverbal. I don’t know what he’s going to say or if he is going to say anything. But then she had pictures. So she had a picture of a cheeseburger. He loves food. So he was like, ‘Cheeseburger.’
“So even though he is not able to have a full conversation, he still was able to be a part of the song,” Mindy said. “And she made this verse about cheeseburgers. She asked, ‘What do you like to eat in your cheeseburgers?’ And he said, “ketchup.’ And so she made this whole verse for him.”
When it comes to making music, the kids all love playing the drums, a good way to improve their skills on several different levels, Elverd said.
“We can do more structured drumming activities that not only are working on the motor skills that we have established as a goal, but also working on the cognitive piece, following directions and playing when I’m told or modeling or imitating different rhythms.
“It’s always an opportunity for the kids in the group to just make music however they want to. They can improvise on the drums.”
While this is the Telehealth program’s first go-round, the hope is to make it an ongoing effort, not just for the kids—although that is its prime aim—but also for the music therapy students to accumulate the hours they need in real-world practice to graduate.
“A lot of the parents have even asked, ‘Are you going to continue to do this?’” Elverd said. “We love this. We want to do this some more.
“We’d like to do longer because the longer we work with our clients, the more we get to understand what they can and cannot do and what they need.”
Mindy is one of the parents asking for the program to continue.
“I was like, ‘Katie, please tell me you’re going to keep doing this in the fall.’ She said, ‘You’re going to be the first one on the list if we do.’”
“I said, ‘OK, good.’”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGpKZQWT_lU&feature=youtu.be
