Sight Reading vs Reading Intervalically
Found in: Reading
Kylie S., Australia
I just finished watching the training materials for reading pitch. Three questions came up for me…
- At the beginning of the training, Neil mentions how developing sight-reading skills is a completely different ballgame to learning to read intervalically and deepen the generative skills. My question: Do we expect students to naturally develop sight reading skills as they play new material regularly. Or do we focus on sight-reading further down the track (Time for More Music??). I’m just confused as to how this all plays out. Is sight reading not considered important?
- Also, does there come a point when we teach the students the names of the notes apart from C. Do we ever teach them that this is a “D” and so on?
- When students are up to learning songs through reading, would we typically learn one hand at a time before putting together? This was not clarified in the training. In my experience, this was the typical way of doing it in a traditional lesson, and I’m wondering if the same approach is generally used – of course after analysing the piece.
It looks very exciting, but as this is my first glimpse at how this process works, I still have some questions about it.
Laurie Richards, Nebraska
Hi Kylie,
I’ll respond to your questions by number:
1. Neil is referring to sight-reading as the ability to play fairly well a brand new piece from the music having never seen it before. That is a skill that can be practiced or develops naturally for some, but not specifically addressed in the SM curriculum. For students who want to work specifically on sight-reading, there are simple steps you can assign. But that wouldn’t be necessary until they finish TFMM at a minimum.
2. No, we do not specifically teach the note names in this way; it is completely unnecessary. It happens naturally the more music students read. I liken it to learning the note names on the keys of the piano. We only teach the C note. They naturally pick up the others, I think mainly from finding chords. At first it may seem a bit cumbersome reading the intervals, but it doesn’t take long to develop an ease with visual recognition of specific intervals. The less the need to focus on the intervals, the more the brain begins to recognize/automatically remember the note names on the staff. Eventually it becomes second nature. I really believe this method produces much stronger readers than those that teach only note names.
3. You won’t even need to address this until you get through Reading Rhythm, then Reading Notes, and get started on TFMM. This is where your students will start learning music from the written page. Neil has a system that we teach for approaching a new piece of music, and all of your questions will be answered in that program. This is such a cool part of the curriculum – everything, from the playing-based strategies to the rhythm and pitch programs comes together, and you see some really great things evolve from your students as they become more comfortable with it. They use all of the strategies we teach from the beginning.
I know it’s hard to wait and see how it all comes together, but it’s totally worth the wait! Just stick to the program and try to let go of previously held notions of how to teach reading. Have fun!