Lusting for Zizzle Zoundz

Alex loves music - on his own terms. At home and in the car you can often find him singing (loudly) and dancing around. He's kind of like when you get a song stuck in your head and you need to sing it 500 times to get it out. Well, he'll sing or play the same music/video clip over and over again til I want to climb onto my roof and jump. But, he's singing and he's happy, and I deal with it. So, this kid who loves music and is a recovered Wiggles junkie... he doesn't do so well in groups with singing or clapping - unless you want a meltdown. He's gotten significantly better about the clapping and singing lately and I've come to realize that much of his meltdown is a habit and kinda fake. He recovers far too quickly for it to be anything signficant and I know that he can break this and get past it.

A few weeks ago I learned of an opportunity for him to attend music therapy sessions for children with Autism that are being offered in my area - ironically all of about 1 mile away from my house. The classes are short, just 30 minutes long and being led by a Music teacher who is pretty darn amazing. My fav autism organization POAC is sponsoring the sessions and they are free to children on the spectrum - siblings welcome and parents encouraged to attend. Last week we got to go and try it out and Alex had a lot of fun. They didn't do very much singing and instead focused on instruments - right up his alley. Alex has always played our piano and never been a pounder - he'll actually play up and down the keys in a scale and try to play songs. Go Alex! So, today marked session #2 for Alex and off we went hoping for the best. We did bring his ear muffs (shooting range ear protection) with us to help him out if it got to be too much. Good thing we did since today they sang.. and sang... and clapped.. and he really wasn't going for it. He wasn't melting down but rather excused himself into the neighboring room to get the heck away. Until... the teacher started playing a really melodical song on the flute. Once the flute started he slowly but surely made his way into the room and back up towards the circle... Alas, 30 minutes goes by quickly because the session was almost completely over at this point.

The class ended by the teacher bringing out a really cool electronic gadget called Zizzle Zoundz for the kids to play with. Zizzle Zoundz has a base unit and different shapes that make music and light up when placed onto the base. The kids all took turns placing the shapes onto the platform and cheering for each other. Alex was all about this and loved the Zoundz. The kid who hates clapping was clapping away and having no issue during the applause. The Zizzle Zoundz were quite rewarding - (and trippy) for the kids to play with. Yeah, I can totally get that children with Autism (as well as typical kids and their parents....) could really get into this toy. I have a feeling we'll be adding some Zizzle Zoundz into our toy/therapy armory here some time soon.




Must have Zizzle Zoundz.