How to Sing
- Joanna Wright
- Mar 17, 2017
- 2 min read
In music we heavily discussed principles behind good practice of teaching music: particularly in singing or teaching a song.
To reinforce what we talked about in these pointers, we watched videos of the Scunthorpe Co-operative Junior Choir and observed the method of the conductor who was teaching the children their song. this was a slightly different stance to what a primary teacher may hold but the pedagogy behind her teaching was the same: she used specific techniques like:
From using all these techniques, the conductor was able to teach the children a performance like this:
- because of the high expectations set (TS1), the choir were able to produce an extremely high quality performance. With all eyes on he conductor at all times, the high quality of diction meant that the audience could hear every word being sung. They all walked in as one and throughout the performance every single young person kept smiling.
This session in music we also looked at various songs that could potentially be taught in the classroom, and it was good to directly see the modelling of how to teach a song to children using these principles and good practices.
We saw how you could organise and split the room to do different parts of the song, and we also discussed how to adapt teaching (TS5) if pupils were taking longer to pick up the tune of the song. The idea of teaching without words was also highlighted; we debated whether giving words to pupils was a good idea when teaching a song, and we reasoned that if children learn the words without having them physically in front of them, it will create a deeper knowledge of the song as they rely fully on listening to the teacher and repeating what they are singing. While this puts more 'pressure' on the teacher to know the words and the song itself inside out, it means that children will have a more secure learning of the song rather than reading the words off a screen or off a page in front of them. It also means potenetially that the soing will be learnt quicker and physical movement like actions or dance can begin to be brought in.
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