Music For Kiddos Podcast
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On this blog post and on episode 80 of the Music For Kiddos Podcast, I’m sharing with you five regulation strategies for early childhood. Now, I have a gazillion and a half of these. In fact, I actually created a whole entire course about them with occupational therapist, Laurie Appel, OTR/L, and my music therapy colleague, who specializes in sensory integration, Kate Schnieder, MT-BC. This course, Sensory Songs, it's all about recognizing sensory overwhelm, sensory sensitivities and sensory preferences, and then, using music strategies to encourage sensory regulation.
If this is a new and kind of intriguing topic for you, you might want to read this blog post, and listen to this podcast episode where I talk and share more sensory strategies. Basically, we're helping kids to regulate their sensory systems through music. Whether they're overstimulated, having a hard time focusing and bringing their attention in and helping them calm a bit. Or even if a child is under-stimulated and needs some more energy or input, there's different sensory-based strategies to support kids.
Many of these five sensory regulation strategies that I'm going to share with you today are related to bringing the energy level down, but the concepts certainly certainly apply to also bringing the energy level up a little bit. All right, let's go ahead and get started.
5 Sensory Regulation Strategies For Early Childhood Music
Before we start, let me preface that three of these sensory regulation strategies are songs and two of these are concepts, so you’ll see the songs linked here so you can use them right away with your students or clients.
1- Light A Candle
Light A Candle it's a song that provides a great way to get kids into mindful breathing in a really fun way.
They basically have no idea that you're gonna be having them breathe, and they are SO into this song! With Light A Candle, pretend that your finger is a candle, and when you light the candle, point your finger up. Then, you blow it out (blow out your finger) and the candle goes back down. We light the candle and then we blow it out and the candle goes up and back down as we sing the song.
In the video above, you'll notice that I played around with the timing of this song; I didn't do really a strict timing. And when I actually do it with kids in real time, I really stretch out the timing. Sometimes I sing it a little bit faster, sometimes I sing it a little slower. Sometimes I put an oddly long pause in there so that I get their eyes looking back at me, wondering what I'm going to say “blow it out.”
Why do I do this? If the song has momentum, kids are going to be more likely to pay attention to it, it's going to be more interesting to them and again, the goal of this song is to get them to take these big, deep, regulating breaths.
2- Sensory regulation Strategy: Reframing our language
I think of this strategy as a reframing of language, a way that we can make our language really kid-centered and taking away blame. If a child is overstimulated, it is certainly not their fault. I live under the umbrella of “there's no such thing as bad kid.“
If a child is overstimulated, there is something about their system, their processing, that has made them overstimulated; it's not that they are choosing to be overstimulated.
One of the things that I learned from my occupational therapist friend Laurie Appel, OTR/L early on when I worked for her like 15 years ago was to identify the overstimulation by not blaming the child like “you are out of control, etc.” and instead identifying different body parts like “I noticed that your feet are wiggly today, I wonder if we should give your feet an opportunity to move!” See the reframe?
Instead of “it's time to stop talking” or “wow, you're really talking a lot today” you could say something like “your brain has a lot of ideas today” or “I wonder if we need to maybe give your brain something to do because it seems like it’s busy.”
Did you notice how even the way that I'm speaking totally changes the meaning because it's more of a celebration of what their body is doing rather than a critique.
That language shift can make a HUGE difference in how we support kids. It changes the tone, it changes the feeling. It also helps you as the teacher, as the music therapist or as the facilitator in this situation to have more empathy for kids and come up with different strategies.
So, it's good for the child, because it takes away this blame, but it's also good for you because it helps you remember that this sensory overwhelm, this behavior is not something that the child is generally choosing to do.
3- I Need A Break
The third strategy on this list is my song called I Need A Break. This song really holds musically the feeling of needing a break really well. This is a great song if a kid needs a break but even if a teacher needs a break…
If you are a classroom teacher and you feel yourself getting to that point of sensory overwhelm, which of course happens to adults (happens to me all the time!), if you are a really sensory sensitive kind of person, I have a lot of empathy for you!
If you as a teacher or as a music therapist need a breather, go ahead and put this song on because it's really good practice for kids before they get overwhelmed to hear this song and learn that they can even communicate when they need a break.
This song essentially follows the ISO-principle in music therapy, where you musically meet somebody where they are. We meet them where they are with their energy level, and through matching that energy with music and shifting the music where you want them to be (i.e. relaxed. calm, energized, etc.).
Another helpful thing about this song is that it encourages kids to move their bodies during this emotion-filled time.
After this song, you can maybe play other movement song and you gradually reduce the energy or intensity of them. You can start with an active movement song. Then, a transitional movement song, and finish with breath-work kind of song to help them gradually reduce the stimuli [learn more about the different types of movement songs here].
4- Sensory regulation strategy: how is your engine running?
Number four is another language shift that I learned working in a sensory integration center. A prompt to check in with kids. The prompt was “How is your engine running?” and kids would describe their “engine” like “I'm bunny speed” or “I'm fast, my engine is running kind of fast today”, or “I'm turtle speed”, “My engine is running kind of slow today”, or “I'm just alright.”
If kids could identify how their engine was running that day, then eventually, they would be able to self-identify what kind of tools they needed to use to get back to feeling just right.
Because I want to tell you exactly where these terms originated from, I just did some Googling and it looks like the program is called the Alert Program, created by a couple of occupational therapists. I'm not providing any kind of endorsement for that program because I honestly don't know anything about it beyond this kind of language use but I want to make sure to give credit to them because I’ve found this language incredibly useful.
I’ve used this language with my daughter, who has a lot of sensory sensitivities like I do, and it’s been incredibly helpful to be able to say to her “Are you feeling bunny speed right now?” or “Is your brain feeling bunny speed right now?” etc., and then I could give some examples on how to turn this feeling around like “maybe we need to take a break to help my body to get back to feeling alright”, for example.
It's just a really kid-centered, friendly, empathy-filled way to identify these feelings. And we are also helping kids have some sort of autonomy by being a part of that decision-making process of the strategies they could utilize to help their bodies feel better.
5- Breathe
My song Breathe is such a simple song that incorporates stretching and movement and a lot of space in it to give kids an opportunity to breathe and stretch a little bit.
A lot of music therapists & music educators use this song at the end of their therapy sessions or classes, for some “peace and calm” at the end of a group or at the end of a session.
If you find the topic of helping kids regulate through music and you’d like to learn more, there's no better way to dive into my philosophy than to take our course Sensory Songs.
Sensory Songs is a video course that explores music as a supportive tool for sensory regulation. This course features an occupational therapist and two music therapists who walk you through concepts such as: sensory processing, regulation and modulation, sensory seeking and/or avoiding tendencies, and music strategies for regulation.
Deep breathing, movement, expressing feelings... music can help kids understand that overwhelm happens to everyone (even adults!), it won't last forever, and we can often use music to help our bodies feel more centered and regulated.
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