Music for Special Kids – Musical Activities, Songs, Instruments and Resources
By: Pamela Ott
Jessica Kingsley Publishers
15 March 2011, 192pp
Paperback Book £14.99
ISBN: 978-1-849058582
By: Pamela Ott
Jessica Kingsley Publishers
15 March 2011, 192pp
Paperback Book £14.99
ISBN: 978-1-849058582
This comprehensive, practical resource is packed with ideas and fun activities to enhance children’s enjoyment of music. Written by Pamela Ott, Director of Music Therapy for children with developmental disabilities at the UCP of Southern Arizona, this book will be useful tool for all parents and teachers, helping to engage children through songs and musical instruments, whether the children have developmental disabilities or not.
Montessori teachers will need to use some of the activities selectively; in the section of playing instruments, Ott suggests practicing colour recognition on the piano keyboard by taping coloured cards to the 61 keys. This complex activity ignores the need to isolate, identify and produce sounds and/or colours through three period lessons.
Many of the walking to music activities can be incorporated into the traditional Montessori line exercise, which can be extended to include bends, zigzags and corners.
Children with Down syndrome and Cerebral Palsy will love the joyful percussion activities, action rhymes and relaxation activities. There is plenty here to encourage individual and group work, self esteem, communication skills and movement coordination.
Musical concepts, including changes in dynamics and tempo are included together with a good section on staccato (short and detached, hopping, jumping freezing movements) and legato (long and smooth, gliding, twirling, sweeping movements).
Children with auditory processing disorders, including those with autism, will benefit from having new songs or musical activities presented very slowly and softly, repeating each activity often so it can be fully assimilated by the children. This useful book is supported by plenty of sheet music and quiet time activities.
Montessori teachers will need to use some of the activities selectively; in the section of playing instruments, Ott suggests practicing colour recognition on the piano keyboard by taping coloured cards to the 61 keys. This complex activity ignores the need to isolate, identify and produce sounds and/or colours through three period lessons.
Many of the walking to music activities can be incorporated into the traditional Montessori line exercise, which can be extended to include bends, zigzags and corners.
Children with Down syndrome and Cerebral Palsy will love the joyful percussion activities, action rhymes and relaxation activities. There is plenty here to encourage individual and group work, self esteem, communication skills and movement coordination.
Musical concepts, including changes in dynamics and tempo are included together with a good section on staccato (short and detached, hopping, jumping freezing movements) and legato (long and smooth, gliding, twirling, sweeping movements).
Children with auditory processing disorders, including those with autism, will benefit from having new songs or musical activities presented very slowly and softly, repeating each activity often so it can be fully assimilated by the children. This useful book is supported by plenty of sheet music and quiet time activities.
DYSPRAXIA FOUNDATION AUTUMN 2010
Smart Moves: Why learning is not all in the head
The author is Carla Hannaford, Ph. D., a biologist and educator with more than thirty years of teaching experience including practice with children with learning difficulties. She is an internationally recognised educational consultant and has contributed over one hundred articles to educational and science journals and specialist magazines. She is the author of several other books, all related to the development of learning. Hannaford is well qualified to discuss the importance of movement in the learning process and Smart Moves has a comprehensive reference section from which she has drawn, and includes a number of case studies.
MONTESSORI INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE AUTUMN 2009
The Imprinted Brain: How genes set the balance
between autism and psychosis.
By: Christopher Badcock
Jessica Kingsley Publishers, London and Philadelphia
2009, 256pp
Hardback £16.99
ISBN 978-1-84905-023-4
Christopher Badcock sets out a new approach to mental development and disorder based on recently discovered genetic effects involving not only the inheritance of genes, but their expression.
Autism research suggests that human beings have evolved two parallel ways of thinking: people-thinking mentalistic cognition is wholly concerned with understanding people, their minds, emotions and motives, and thing-thinking, mechanistic cognition which concerns understanding and interacting with physical, inert objects.
Badcock argues that autism (mechanistic) is at one end of a spectrum or continuum and psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia (mentalistic) are at the other. What passes for normality is a more or less stable balance of both tendencies.
Montessori might well have agreed with Badcock’s assertion that people with autism take routes leading from detail-to-whole and specific-to-general thinking, when designing her concrete –to-abstract programme materials. Celebrated autistic engineer Temple Grandin is quoted in this book, ‘All my thinking goes from specific details to forming a general principle.’
With the benefit of hindsight, traditional psychoanalysis – the so called talking cure – would appear to be the very worst kind of therapy anyone on the psychotic side of the spectrum. Psychoanalytic ‘insight’ is wholly mentalistic, inherently subjective and qualitative; like placebos, faith-healing or hypnosis it is entirely dependent on the belief of the person under analysis for its efficacy.
If you only read one ‘brain’ book this year make it The Imprinted Brain – its relevance and objectivity will appeal to all who have an interest in autism and/or psychosis.
Wendy Fidler
07710 433 994
[email protected]
Autism research suggests that human beings have evolved two parallel ways of thinking: people-thinking mentalistic cognition is wholly concerned with understanding people, their minds, emotions and motives, and thing-thinking, mechanistic cognition which concerns understanding and interacting with physical, inert objects.
Badcock argues that autism (mechanistic) is at one end of a spectrum or continuum and psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia (mentalistic) are at the other. What passes for normality is a more or less stable balance of both tendencies.
Montessori might well have agreed with Badcock’s assertion that people with autism take routes leading from detail-to-whole and specific-to-general thinking, when designing her concrete –to-abstract programme materials. Celebrated autistic engineer Temple Grandin is quoted in this book, ‘All my thinking goes from specific details to forming a general principle.’
With the benefit of hindsight, traditional psychoanalysis – the so called talking cure – would appear to be the very worst kind of therapy anyone on the psychotic side of the spectrum. Psychoanalytic ‘insight’ is wholly mentalistic, inherently subjective and qualitative; like placebos, faith-healing or hypnosis it is entirely dependent on the belief of the person under analysis for its efficacy.
If you only read one ‘brain’ book this year make it The Imprinted Brain – its relevance and objectivity will appeal to all who have an interest in autism and/or psychosis.
Wendy Fidler
07710 433 994
[email protected]
NASEN AUGUST 19, 2009
Art as an Early Intervention Tool for Children with Autism
Art as an Early Intervention Tool for Children with Autism is newly published by Jessica Kingsley. Nicole Martin is a registered art therapist and founder of Sky's The Limit Studio in Lawrence, Kansas, which provides art therapy, music therapy, and counselling services tailored to the specific needs of individuals with autism spectrum disorders and other communication, attention, social-emotional, or neurodevelopmental issues.
