Music Education for Kids With Auditory Sensitivities

"In its very broadest sense, APD refers to how the central nervous system (CNS) uses auditory information. However, the CNS is vast and also is responsible for functions such as memory, attention, and language, among others. To avoid confusing APD with other disorders that can affect a person's ability to attend, understand, and remember, it is important to emphasize that APD is an auditory deficit that is not the result of other higher-order cognitive, language, or related disorder.

There are many disorders that can affect a person's ability to understand auditory information. For example, individuals with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) may well be poor listeners and have difficulty understanding or remembering verbal information; however, their actual neural processing of auditory input in the CNS is intact. Instead, it is the attention deficit that is impeding their ability to access or use the auditory information that is coming in. Similarly, children with autism may have great difficulty with spoken language comprehension. However, it is the higher-order, global deficit known as autism that is the cause of their difficulties, not a specific auditory dysfunction. Finally, although the terms language processing and auditory processing sometimes are used interchangeably, it is critical to understand that they are not the same thing at all.

For many children and adults with these disorders and others - including mental retardation and sensory integration dysfunction - the listening and comprehension difficulties we often see are due to the higher-order, more global or all-encompassing disorder and not to any specific deficit in the neural processing of auditory stimuli per se. As such, it is not correct to apply the label APD to these individuals, even if many of their behaviors appear very similar to those associated with APD. In some cases, however, APD may co-exist with ADHD or other disorders. In those cases, only careful and accurate diagnosis can assist in disentangling the relative effects of each."
~American Speech-Language-Hearing Association

Music Activities You Can Do With Your Child
This is two pages of activities provided by Scholastic.com--well worth a click!

Creative and Therapeutic Art Activities
The arts have been long-known to promote healing in the individual, many of the activities in this article would benefit the child with auditory issues and the child with autistic-spectrum disorders.

Musical Activities for Kids
This resource comes from TLC, a handful of music activities here.

Music Activities for Kids and Families
This is another long resource list, links, and references all provided by the people at biglearning.com.

DSO Kids
This is a nice website that provides music resources for classical education. Listen to classical music by composer, play music games online, and explore the education programs or their lesson-plan database--FREE.

Music Games for Kids
There are a few more online music games located here at Kaboose.com.

Classics for Kids
More games and resources from ClassicsforKids.com.

Great Sites for Kids-Music Sites
Here is yet another long list of links to music-sites provided by KidSites.com--the leading guide to the best kids' web sites.