Monthly Archives: November 2016

78/100 Teaching “The Angel Gabriel from Heaven Came”

This has to be one of my all-time favourite carols, with its haunting, lilting tune. Here’s the choir of King’s College Cambridge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pliqObTHxUQ However it’s not a straightforward tune to teach to primary school children. I had a class of 7-8 … Continue reading

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77/100 Grade 1 sight reading – with flats

A while ago I posted up a page of short piano pieces in C major for sight reading practice. The young student I gave them to rattled them all off to me in her piano lesson. This week, I took the … Continue reading

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76/100 Carols for cellos – with flats!

I’m teaching several groups of young Grade 2 cellists at the moment, covering for a colleague. All the groups are wrestling with the intricacies of B flat and E flat major scales – the novelty of “first finger back” on … Continue reading

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75/100 The shy soloist

This week’s challenge with the infant class concerned the soloist for the Nativity Play. She is supposed so be a sheep, and has a solo to sing to the other sheep. Left to her own devices, she sings confidently all … Continue reading

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74/100 The Singing Tummy-Button Success

The last post concerned a young lad in the infant class who consistently sang in a high-pitched version of the more usual drone of children who “haven’t found their singing voice”. A week later, and I was working with the … Continue reading

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73/100 Sing through your tummy button

I feel very strongly that is it so important to help young children find their “singing voice”. We have just a couple of years to manage this, before the children become aware that they “can’t sing” and become embarrassed to … Continue reading

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72/100 Cracking the Code

There’s a lot said about “sound before symbol” in teaching young children, and quite rightly too. However there comes a point where the children need to be able to fathom out the symbols in order to get on with learning … Continue reading

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71/100 More about sight-reading

Following on from my previous post on C major sight-reading… I started the ABRSM Grade 1 piano exam piece “O when the saints” place with a very young pupil this morning. She’s an astonishingly quick learner, but like many children (and … Continue reading

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