Music Therapy at Anchor Center

Music Therapy at Anchor Center helps children work on all areas of development which is important because we know that vision impairments can impact all developmental domains. During Music Therapy, the children will play instruments, sing, move to the music, or respond to the music to work on the following goals:

• Fine and gross motor skills: using rhythm to coordinate neural-muscular system, instruments motivate fine and gross motor exploration
• Communication skills: using predictability of music to elicit and organize vocal/verbal responses, using music play to work on back and forth communication, choice-making
• Social skills: turn taking, sharing, call and response, listening skills, observing and imitating others
• Self-confidence, self-expression, emotional regulation: creating music is a powerful experience that allows for individual self-expression and a feeling of belonging/contributing to the group; tempo, rhythm, and volume of music can be used to calm or stimulate internal state
• Sensory integration: multi-sensory experience presented in an organized, predictable way to help the brain understand and respond appropriately to sensory information
• Pre-academic/literacy skills: concept building, story-telling, memory and learning enhanced through organizational elements of music
• Sound localization and compensatory skills: music provides organization and motivation to help the children to identify the source of sounds, strengthening their ability to use sound to understand and navigate the world