Trying to develop mastery of dotted rhythms? Set up a custom difficulty in the Sight-Reading Builder that has dotted rhythms, but at slow tempos, with simple pitches. Practicing sight-reading in class can also reinforce concepts you know students are struggling with. This comfort will translate to sight-reading at contests, first runs of concert music, and learning new etudes or exercises.
They know what to expect: a new rhythm to read today. When students come to expect sight-reading practice, they’re less fearful of the unknown. The key is to make sight-reading part of your daily routine. There are dozens of ways to customize the difficulty, and you can save your customizations to reuse over and over again. The customizations are also great for focusing on a particular concept, new piece of music theory, or tricky technique. You can gradually ramp up the difficulty, or customize the exercises with specific rhythms. When every class-virtual or not-starts with clapping, you turn on students’ brains, get them thinking musically, and have daily practice in developing a sense of time and pulse. You’ll never run out of sight-reading material again-and you can have the first exercise ready to go for virtual lessons.Ī great way to start is to generate rhythm-only exercises. SmartMusic’s Sight Reading Builder comes with 10 predefined levels and only takes a click of a button to generate a new exercise. Instead of passing out exercise after exercise as sheet music, you can use cloud-based tools like SmartMusic to quickly generate infinite sight-reading practice for in-class use. One of the biggest ways that sight-reading can be a time sink is simply gathering the content, and technology can help. In this article, I’ll cover how you can use technology to produce unlimited sight-reading exercises, adapt them to keep kids engaged at home, and track your students’ progress. You’re likely better off just getting students to spend time reading, rather than focusing on assessment. How do you track that student is developing musical literacy or improving their technique? Playing tests are a go-to in most classrooms, but they can be hard to evaluate virtually.
HOW DO YOU TRANSPOSE AN EXERCISE IN THE NEW SMARTMUSIC HOW TO
Making sight-reading part of each lesson or practice session can be difficult-for starters, you need new music every single time you work on sight-reading! No one has an unlimited library of materials, let alone one tailored to a particular class or student’s sight-reading level.Įven after you conquer the logistical challenges of practicing sight-reading, you end up confronting how to assess sight-reading. Of course, teachers know that’s easier said than done, especially when students aren’t physically present in a classroom. The best way to build better sight-readers? Make them sight-read!