Singing Program for Children with Special Needs at Alapakkam Life health Center for Rural Rehabilitation and Development
The music therapy event was an attempt to empower the children with disabilities through a music, movement, and playing of musical instruments program. The focus was to offer a very safe and non-threatening environment through music to enhance self-expression, encourage creativity and self-expression. All the children participated with great interest in all the activities and some interesting responses for the program from the children who could verbalize were “Please come every day”, “Will you all come home with me?” The event motivated the faculty and students to make this a regular program to integrate effectively music in their learning environment with a goal to make previously difficult learning tasks easy and to enhance physical and psycho-social growth of the children housed in the school. The SBV university approved this program to be an on-going one, weekly once from CMTER from Jan’ 2015 not only as a community project but also as a way to provide opportunities to the music therapy students to learn to work with this population as a part of internship training offered during the Post Graduate Diploma program in music therapy.
