[Tabatha Tillman]

I love the car on my knee song. I have so many little boys that love their cars and don’t want to put them away for therapy, so this song is becoming very helpful in finding a musical way to bring their cars into the session for a short period. I also love the good morning song! One of my professors actually taught us this song in college and I use it all the time. It’s a very calm and welcoming way to say hello for my lower functioning kids or for kids who are cranky! I’m excited to incorporate the other songs and find better ways to structure my session with music!

[Tabatha Tillman]

Most of the children that I work with are in the awareness stage. I have a child that I work with and she loves to look at what I’m doing and then look away and shake her head no. It’a how she communicates that she doesn’t want to do something, but it also makes it difficult because there are very few things she actually wants to sit and do. She turns her head toward me when I sing, but if her mom joins in she focuses more on her mom due to preferring that timbre. This child also makes repeated sounds, but she really loves saying guh over and over. She will grasp instruments and also rock along to the music.

[Tabatha Tillman]

Carrie, I love what you said about meeting the kids where they are! Sometimes it’s so easy to have the end goal in mind that it can be easy to forget to help them experience where they are now and slowly progress towards the end goal. I especially find it difficult when parents are pressuring me because they don’t feel like their kids are progressing at the rate that they should, but each kid progresses at their own rate and there’s only so much we can do until they’re able to pick up and understand what’s being worked on!

[Tabatha Tillman]

I love that at the beginning of this lesson it said “moving children and their families to a healthy path.” Sometimes it’s so easy for me to just work with the children I’m working with and not incorporate the families, so this was a good reminder that for this to work most efficiently I need to make sure the families are playing a part also! I also love having these scales because I have a lot of children that I’m working on Communication goals with and I’ve been struggling to figure out where they should be on the scale.

[Tabatha Tillman]

Hello my name is Tabatha Tillman. I live in Augusta, Georgia with my husband of almost two years. I finished my internship at the Charlie Norwood VA Medical Center in December of 2017. I was Board Certified in January of 2018, so I haven’t been practicing very long. I was born and raised in Augusta, Georgia and I came back home to start a private practice after school due to the lack of music therapy in this area. I work with variety of populations, but my main group is early intervention (0-3). My internship and most of my clinical experience in college was with adults, so it has been a big adjustment working with children. The music therapy facebook groups have been a big help in this, but I wanted to take this course to have a better foundation. I’m doing the best I can with the children that I work with, but I want to be able to provide the best services that I can!

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