Hello bflat! First, here is an old thread that may interest you: Music and the mentally handicapped

I'm an assistant at a L'Arche community so I spend a lot of time in musical play with people with learning disabilities, and I give private guitar lessons to two people with Down's Syndrome.

Here are some suggestions for activities:

- cooperative guitar: you finger the chords, they strum. You might try pausing the singing if they pause the strumming, to encourage them to keep up the rhythm.

- tune the guitars to open chords (I usually use open G: DGDGBD) so that when someone is strumming without fretting the sound is more enjoyable.

- if you have three guitars, tune one to open G, one to open D, and one to open A. Then you can form an orchestra - sing a song in D and conduct by pointing to who should be strumming during each bar.

- slides! The folks I work with love slides, just to mess around with and enjoy the different sound. Also, if the guitar is tuned to an open chord, the slide can be used as a simple (if not great-sounding) way to change chords. Mark the fifth and seventh frets on the edge of the fretboard with stickers, and you've got another way to play those wonderful three-chord songs.

- if people are shy about singing, they might be more willing to participate if you leave out the last word in each line and pause until someone sings it. There's an autistic man in my community who loves doing this and has a small repertoire of songs that he requests and then fills in words for. Interestingly, he never sings the very last word of any song - I'm guessing that that's because helping me sing the other lines will cause me to continue the song, so he's "rewarded" for supplying the word, but there's nothing in it for him to end the song.

- if some of your people have physical disabilities as well, you'll have to be creative in helping them to play the instruments somehow. There's an elderly man in our community who was once a VERY avid fiddler, but cannot play his fiddle any more because of his physical deterioration. So I put his bow into his right hand, then I hold up the fiddle against the bow, and make a U with my thumb and index finger around the bow and against the fiddle body so that his bow can't go wild. When he has the energy he moves the bow, and when he doesn't I rub the fiddle against the bow. It sounds terrible, but it makes him happy, and that's what it's all about.

I'll add more if I can think of more - good luck!

Marion