Sight reading is a valuable skill for any musician and is part of developing any well-rounded musician. Therefore, it's important that we as teachers are including as many opportunities for our students to sight read new music as possible.
According to the Hungarian school of music education (the OG Kodály educators!) there are two main ways of preparing and delivering a sight reading task: Recognitional and Traditional.
Before I go into each method, however, here are a few guidelines for success in sight reading.
Keep it simple!
When students are reading new music, the main challenge should be that it is new and unfamiliar to them. It shouldn't also feature really tricky intervals or rhythms and DEFINITELY shouldn't have any new elements (sight reading is not the way to introduce a new element, it comes much later in the process).
Use simple notation
It's perfectly fine to use a simplified form of notation, such as stick rhythms with solfa underneath when sight reading. Just because you have presented stave notation doesn't mean you are now "going backwards" by using stick & solfa. It's simply removing one extra layer of challenge, making it more likely your kiddos will succeed!
Prep your students
Sight reading doesn't have to mean literally singing sight-unseen. You can do some things to prepare your students, such as singing short melodic passages from the same key as the sight reading excerpt, or even singing melodic turns from the excerpt itself, in order to prepare the students' ears. You can use the finger stave to get students oriented and familiar with where do will live on the stave for this excerpt.
Now, let's take a look at these two approaches!
Let's take this excerpt from Vivaldi's Four Seasons (Winter, mvt. 2) as an example
Traditional Approach
In the traditional approach, the excerpt would be displayed on the board, or each student given a copy of the sheet music. The teacher then asks several orienteering questions, like:
What is the key signature?
What do we call the first note?
What do we call the last note?
Where is the highest note & what is it called?
What about the lowest note?
How many bars are there?
What rhythm can you see most frequently?
Depending on the stage that the students are at, you may then practise just the rhythm by tapping & saying rhythm names. However, past a certain point, students should be ready to take both rhythm and melody on at the same time.
Then, it's up to inner hearing! The teacher will hum the first pitch and count students in, but students are then expected to inner hear the melody first time. The teacher should ask the students to sing the final note out loud to check that they've all kept track (hopefully, if everyone sight reads well, they should all sing the final note at the same time - even better if they all agree on the same pitch!)
If there are tricky intervals, such as the 7th leaps in this excerpt, the teacher can sing one or two pitches out loud periodically throughout the piece, to help students keep on track. For example, in this excerpt, I would sing the first note out loud, then perhaps the re-so at the end of bar 1. Possibly also the fa at the beginning of bar 2. Then definitely do, low ti and low la leaps in bars 3 and 4.
After this, the students should try singing the excerpt out loud in solfa. Hopefully the preparatory steps (coupled with selecting an excerpt at the right level for your students) will mean they are successful, but if not, simply isolate any tricky passages, clarify what the solfa is, practise those particular intervals and put it back into context.
Recognitional Sight Reading
In this approach, the teacher actually provides an aural model for the students (either by singing or playing in some way, eg. on piano) and they must recognise sections of the music.
This can easily be made into a game by having the excerpt chopped into sections, jumbled up and assigned a colour. Students listen to the teacher perform one bar and identify which colour they heard (either by telling you or perhaps by moving to an assigned corner of the room). You can then do 2 bars at a time and build up to all 4 bars in the order of the excerpt.
Once it comes time for the students to sight read, they already have an aural model of how it should sound, therefore it becomes easier to perform accurately.
As you can see from the picture below, depending on the level of the students, it is possible to provide little scaffolds like having the occasional solfa syllable written underneath a note to help with difficult passages.
Remember that the main aim of sight reading is to build fluency and for your students to achieve success. The excerpt shouldn't be too difficult and the students should be given helpful pointers along the way.
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