“I don’t like sight reading”

As a music teacher, you’ve probably heard some of these typical responses from children who play an instrument by ear or memorizing finger movements. Many children find it challenging to play and read from a music score at the same time, and so, resort to memorization.

That’s because reading and playing the notes at the same time is not a natural learning skill compared to listening to a tune and playing impromptu.

Everyone picks up a language by listening and imitating the pronunciation, and just like the words we speak, music is a language – a powerful communication tool that connects people with others and with themselves.

Reading and playing simultaneously needs practice.

Picture this; our eyes are skimming through the score while our fingers perform ‘acrobatics’ to reproduce the accurate sounds demanded by the composer. Coupled with the demands of having to read the performance markings on the scores, calculate the mathematics behind each rhythm and aim our fingers on the correct position of an instrument – it is amazing how our brains handle all these tasks AT THE SAME TIME!

How can we teach children to be better at it and with ease?

 

Here are 5 steps to start building sight-reading skills:

  1. Start NOW
    • Based on my personal experience, reading music notes can be taught to children from 4 years old, using patterns and series of notes. Similarly like how a 4 years old child can recognize the word APPLE, but is unable to spell it.
  2. Small goals
    • Design achievable goals that a child of 4 years old can accomplish. For example, I show a child on the music score – notes that are ‘going up’ and ‘going down’. Then I ask them to use their fingers to visualise ‘go up’ and ‘go down’ accordingly.
    • Winning small goals will setup the child to focus on continuous learning, and motivate the child to believe in themselves.
  3. Praise
    • Do not underestimate the power of kind words. As a rule of thumb, the praise I give to a child is always relatively bigger than what they achieved. Each small goal deserves encouragement and motivation to spur them on.
  4. Review
    • There is no substitute for practice, daily at the very least. It has to be second nature as you simultaneously sight read and play.
  5. Let go
    • Every child has different attention spans that dictate how long they can focus on the task at hand. Once the ‘focus’ bank is all used up, pushing the child to work on the sight-reading will just make the practice frustrating for the child, the teacher and the parent! Allow the child to take their mind off from the sight reading work and let the child do something different, before coming back to the process the next day.

 

These 5 steps are just a start to a lifelong learning on how to teach kids to sight-read. I will share with you in my future blogs, some of the practical strategies that I use for the kids to improve on their sight reading skills.

 

One more thing, every child is unique. When we acknowledge and accept this fact, then we will fine-tune our sight-reading expectations for every single kid. Most importantly, flame the fire of interest for music in the child. Find out what tunes the child likes and use those tunes to teach the child to read music notation!