Monday, November 22, 2010

Food and Music Therapy

For children with physical disabilities, incorporating food and music into their therapy makes therapy a lot more fun, even something for them to look forward to. Alex does not like most therapy that we use to strengthen his arm and hand. But when we add food or music, or both, he forgets that he's in therapy. Creating hand turkeys last week was a lot of fun and good exercise for lefty. I mixed up the sugar cookie dough and allowed him to first knead it, then help me pat and roll it (all activities that use both hands) and of course, he got to eat some. We then placed lefty on the dough, which was tough. When he is excited or nervous, Alex makes a fist of lefty and it is hard to get him to relax to open it up. We were not able to trace over lefty, because he couldn't open it all the way and got frustrated when I encouraged him, so we just let lefty play feel and play with the dough. Any new texture on that left hand stimulates the hand. We traced righty. The next day, we used frosting and candy to decorate the turkeys while we sang a turkey song and continued to discuss Thanksgiving. Izzy had a blast and was very focused when I traced both of her hands.

This weekend, we discovered another therapeutic musical exercise. Alex has been working at the piano, guitar and drums for months, two activities that he naturally will use his left hand to perform. I don't know why lefty follows what righty is doing when it comes to music. Maybe that is something that could be studied more seriously--is it just because music is fun to do with both hands, because new areas of the brain are activated when it hears music, because the music relaxed the brain and muscles and allows the functioning muscles to overpower the tense muscles? I have no idea. When Alex is doing almost anything else, he can find a way not to use his left hand, but when it comes to music, his left hand is immediately involved. He could easily play the piano with one hand, because he is not yet reading music, but he never does, he always puts lefty up there and pounds away with lefty too. The same is true of the drums and the guitar (mostly air guitar which he sings along with, imitating his uncle who is an exceptional banjo player). Alex has asked Santa for a drum set, which Santa will surely bring (Costco, $19).

So, the exercise we discovered this weekend is the harmonica. His grandparents pulled an old one out of a drawer and Daddy showed Alex how to use it, and he immediately started playing it. He loves it. The unique point about the harmonica is that when you hold it to your mouth, both hands are turned toward your face. This is the exact movement that Alex has so much trouble with. His CP causes his hand to turn outward which makes it almost impossible to feed himself, draw, put on shoes, etc. Gripping the harmonica, with support from the strength of the right hand, helped the necessary muscles in the left hand take over so that he could turn his hand toward his face. It was amazing. Because he didn't realize he was doing "therapy", he was relaxed, enjoying his music, and therefore, his left hand was relaxed. His misbehaved left arm muscles relaxed and stopped fighting the muscles that make his hand turn inward.

Incidentally, cookie sales on Friday were excellent. Alex and Izzy had a blast selling their cookies, and soon a handful of the neighborhood kids were helping us too. We took the red wagon down the street with our sign and cookies on top and sold them to the road crew working on our road. In an hour we had sold out. We raised enough money to buy 3 large turkeys. We talked about the activity all weekend, further reinforcing the point of the exercise to the kids. An awesome activity!

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