An Art Therapy Idea Worth Listening To

I love it when I come across great examples of effective art therapy. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I came across a great story about how a teacher successfully implemented art therapy into the classroom. If you’re interested in the details of the activity, it’s worth the read. Here’s a couple of quotes from the original post reflecting what the children accomplished:

…a Middle-Eastern girl drew a woman’s head with deep, black eyes and a stream of tears trickling down her face…In the written reflection of her drawing, she wrote (in third-grade, disproportionately skewed handwriting), “I am sad and alone. Crying in the Sahara desert, I feel lonely. I was kidnapped and left alone.”

…one girl had drawn a crucifix with five nails. Jesus? No, this 9-year old girl, who is crippled with scoliosis and walks around with crutches, wrote in her reflection. “I am nailed to the cross and my world is spinning around. My friends are spinning it until I get really dizzy.”

I’ve been meaning to expand the focus of the Art Therapy blog into a little bit more than just traditional arts media (i.e. painting, drawing, etc.) and this is a great seque. While music therapy is its own beast, it is still a form of art. What’s great about music is that it carries some of the same characteristics as traditional art. Both music and art are capable of conveying emotion without words.

Now, I’m not going to dive into the depths of music therapy right now since I plan on dedicating more time on the topic in the future. However, I did want to talk about how music can support and/or inspire art therapy.

As I said, music is capable of eliciting emotions and trascending language with its rhythms, vibrations, and beats, etc. It can also be used in concert with creating art. There are all sorts of ways people use music to create art. Check out this video of a sand artist creating sand art to the tune of an inspiring soundtrack:

Try adding a bit of music to any of these activities and see what you discover…

If you’re interested, there’s more sand art videos here.