Music Literacy: More Than Simply Notes on a Page!

Florida Singing Sons is committed to quality music education within FSS as well as in K-12 schools. As such, we are excited to offer an innovative 4-day workshop for current and future music educators focused on research-based music teaching methods. Inspiring educator Dr. Carol Krueger will share her approach to building literate and independent musicians. J.W. Pepper is proud to provide reading session materials for this event!

Helping students become musically literate is central to the school, community, and church music curriculum. While there is much agreement about why we should teach sight singing and musicianship skills, there is less agreement about how we should teach those skills. Far too often students are taught to be savvy symbol decoders rather than independent literate musicians.

Working from the premise that students learn musical skills in much the same order as they do language skills, participants will explore how we ‘learn’ music through hearing and imitating patterns before reading (translating notation into sound) and writing (translating sound into notation). The pedagogy also includes sequential techniques for teaching improvisation which is central to developing musicianship and demonstrates the student’s comprehension.

The TAKADIMI rhythm-pedagogy system, a beat-oriented system whose originators see it as evolving from Gordon’s syllables, will be incorporated. The rhythm syllables can easily be adapted to elementary through adult choral and instrumental rehearsals in the church and K-Collegiate setting.

To aid the development of aural-oral tonal skills, the moveable do and la minor tonal system will be incorporated. In addition, a sequence of vocal pitch exercises and chord progressions will be presented in a graphic form to further aid in the acquisition of tonal skills. The exercises explore various tonalities (major, minor, modes, etc.) and tonal functions (tonic, dominant, subdominant, etc.) as well as support the development of audiation, healthy vocal technique and application of skills to literature.​

Workshop participants will also be presented with teaching strategies and techniques for integrating and applying literacy skills to appropriate repertoire with attention given to the development of music literacy curriculum maps and diction maps.

Link to more information or to the event registration: https://www.floridasingingsons.org/summer-literacy-workshop