Sight reading in middle school choir: Strategies for success in matching pitch and keeping students engaged

Abstract

Abstract In my 5 years of teaching sight singing in choir, I have noticed 2 major challenges: one, students lose interest during ‘chaos’ and about half struggle to match pitch. To spark student interest in the chaos portion of our sight singing, I developed some strategies. Students were placed in teams and given team names. Once students silently signed and sang the exercise, I chose a student to spin a wheel. The wheel has 4 components of chaos that I chose for the day. I chose from the following: Count yourself in, show hand signs, accents, persistence, project and intonation. Each group simultaneously did chaos for 1 minute, and I gave points based on the component that the wheel landed on. Every member of the group had to be doing that one component to receive the point. I immediately noticed significant results when I started the competition between teams. Students showed improvement in every aspect of ‘chappi,’ which is a mnemonic we created in class. We also discussed a prize that the winning team would get. Students were motivated by class competitions. To better support students in matching pitch, I researched and implemented the A4 skillset, developed by Theresa Pritchard. I also researched the Rainbow Ears method, developed by Donald Brinegar. The A4 method is where students are taught through a series of vocal exercises to sing A4. The beginning exercises include high pitched sirens followed by the teacher instructing students to sing A4. If students sing something else, they are instructed to start at their lowest note and slowly slide up to A4 position. Once this is learned, students practice downward vocalization and then the goal is for students to be able to sing A4 without the sirens/vocalization. The Donald Brinegar method is based on the premise that students lack discrimination when hearing a particular pitch and instead are hearing ‘a rainbow of overtones and sometimes resultant tones’ (Munce, 2021). The most successful method was the A4 method. When I tried this with my 6th grade boys, 8 out of the 9 were able to match, and when I tried it with me 7/8th grade boys, 6 of the 7 matched. When I attempted to help a student match pitch through an isolated note or phrase, in a small group setting, my success rate was high, but my greatest challenge was when students got back to the group setting. They would tend to go back to old habits. Other roadblocks are allowing for gender specific ensembles in a prek-12 school and finding time to give students the individual help they need. My video teaching demonstration includes students preparing to sing a daily sight singing exercise by singing an ascending and descending scale, silently singing/signing the exercise, playing ‘follow the hand’ and finally participating in ‘chaos’ which is when students sing a sight singing exercise simultaneously with the rest of the class while showing hand signs and accenting the downbeat of every measure.