Personal Reflection

[Anonymous]

Post to the board a personal reflection of what you personally will bring to early childhood music therapy based programs?

Be sure to come back and respond to others as well.

[Erika Svolos]

Looking forward to everyone’s responses. Please remember to return at various time, each week, so that you can read and respond to your fellow participants. This will give you more depth with the training materials.

[Elizabeth Bentz]

I feel that I personally will bring a dual perspective to early childhood music therapy. My son, who will be 2 in September, has developmental delays (gross motor and communication). He is in several therapies, including music therapy. I feel like I have the clinical music therapy perspective and the caregiver perspective. Hearing he has delays and hearing what he “can’t” do is always heart-wrenching, even if I already know it, but I also see him as a happy little boy who loves to play. I think knowing that and experiencing that will help me better relate to families and clients in early childhood music therapy.

[Erika Svolos]

Hi Liz,

Great insights into how we can reframe the unhelpful language from early intervention! I am neurodivergent and have a neruodivergent child myself. I found that helping my families to understand development from the neurodivergent perspective as opposed to the neurotypical scales have been life changing for parents. They found the information helpful in advocating for more appropriate goals and accommodations in educational and recreational settings. I also found that sharing music development and how meaningful that development is in supporting the whole child helps parents see that a person’s value is more than the “skills” they have mastered.

[Holly Jurca]

I always strive to look for context of the individuals I work with. Children at this age cannot express the context they are in and sometimes are unable to understand emotions associated. I feel that after this training I will be able to bring not only a supportive presence, but also the knowledge of their context to further understand what they might be feeling.

[Diandra Doble]

I love this! I think it is so important to have as much knowledge as possible about how children grow, develop and learn the ways of the world. The more knowledge we have, the better we can try and understand these children and what they are trying to articulate.

[Diandra Doble]

I will bring this new knowledge that I am gaining about childhood development into my practice and focus on advocating more for the child’s needs and developmental level. I feel as though more advocation is necessary to educate those in these early childhood settings. I want to be able to advocate and educate more as I do what I do during music-making experiences. I want to be able to explain what I am doing and why I am doing it for the benefit of these children and their development. The staff that sit in and help with sessions I feel could very much benefit from this and gain new knowledge themselves!

[Holly Jurca]

Diandra, I love the bit about advocacy! We are all unaware about early childhood development and the impacts music can make until we learn about it – which we are lucky enough to do in this course. So it will be important to impart all of our learnings this course brings so that others will know what an important thing Sprouting Melodies can be for early childhood development.

[Meghan Hanley]

In my early childhood music therapy programs, I can create an environment that encourages children to explore, such as searching for hidden objects, tracking music visually and aurally, and experimenting with ways to hold and manipulate instruments.

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