Music and Special Education

Music can be a powerful tool for students with special needs, as it can help them develop a wide range of skills. My favourite part of every day is our morning meeting or circle time. With my older students, we called it a morning meeting, and with my kindergarten students, we referred to it as circle time. One thing has stayed consistent regardless of grade: our calendar time, emotion check-in and SONGS! We love using our interactive song pieces as it allows all my students, including those who are non-verbal, to engage and participate with their peers.

Easy to Modify

You can adapt and control many factors by singing the songs with your students. First, you can choose the tempo of the song. Many of my students are nonverbal or beginning to develop their speech, so singing each song very slowly helps them imitate the sounds, and some students will fill in the blanks when I pause during singing. You can also make the songs shorter by removing some pieces. For example, instead of five monkeys jumping on the bed, you can have only two or three. This is something that YouTube or other streaming services cannot provide!

Inclusive

We use an interactive song board to allow each student to select a song. This provides a sense of control and self-expression. When selecting a song, your students are targeting so many skills. They have to wait their turn, scan the board, remove the image and place it in the correct box. As I read it, all my students point to each word, “I want to sing _.” Music can help students with special needs develop social skills by encouraging them to interact with other students and participate in group activities.

Develop New Skills

Music can help develop verbal skills by singing or using music to reinforce vocabulary. By singing familiar songs, my students can complete the actions, make sound imitates and fill in the blanks. A perfect example of this is when singing wheels on the bus. Some students will do the action for the horn, others will make a beep-beep sound, and some of my students will sing certain words or the entire song.

Grab the Itsy Bitsy Spider interactive song from the resource library for FREE!