Ready to Read: 4 Steps for Developing Proficiency (Music Education Basics)

Welcome back to Music Education Basics!

Today, we’re talking about readiness for music-reading and developing proficiency.

Just like learning to read language, music-reading follows listening and responding, developing a musical vocabulary, and active musical experiences in a natural progression, as we’ve been reviewing this week.

If you’re a choir director or an elementary music teacher, I recommend introducing music-reading (as in holding a score in your hand) around 2nd or 3rd grade. We tend to introduce music-reading a little sooner in one-on-one settings — piano lessons or other beginning instrumental studies — but in choir, you can usually wait until 3rd grade and spend more time with rote-learning and gradually bridging that gap.

Start by introducing music notation in small doses: simple tonal or rhythm patterns, like we talked about in Day 2, or a short song with mostly stepwise motion to highlight direction on the staff and how the notes alternate between lines and spaces.

I’ll walk you through a simple 4-step process and a few tangible ways to do this in today's lesson.

For show notes, click here.

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Resources mentioned:

The Art of Music Teaching & Learning — A comprehensive online course for music educators in all types of settings. It's kind of like getting a mini-music education degree in only 8 weeks.

How to Teach Solfege — An in-depth article for elementary music teachers and children’s choir directors