My favourite thing about this website resource.
It's colourful! Interactive! Visually appealing! and.. I guess that's the first step to engage students in practising for good ol' sight singing.
Sight singing is worth 5% in the entire HSC course, and although it seems little, it does make a difference. For many, sight singing is scary - it's a long unseen excerpt where you are given limited time to look at the excerpt and be expected to sing it perfectly pitched and rhythmically accurate. In order to overcome this panic and fear, I decided to scaffold the practice exercises into fun activities to do in pairs, allowing students to understand what really makes up a sight singing excerpt, and how to tackle it bit by bit.
Resource 1: Identifying and Singing Intervals
Students begin practising by learning how to visually identify intervals and be able to pitch them accurately. Eg. for a dominant leap, I've written a side note advising students to think of the 1st two notes in "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star".
Once they are comfortable with pitching two notes, they move on to the next activity:
Resource 2: Identifying and Singing Triads with more Complex Rhythms
Sight singing exercises usually only contain two things: stepwise motion and triads. Being able to identify triads (usually either the tonic or dominant) will make it easier to sing as the student brain will learn to group the notes as one item "C maj triad" rather than 3 separate notes to panic about
The activities come in different keys (up to 3 sharps/flats) just as any exam style sight singing excerpt would
Within each key, there are two excerpts to sing: one focusing on just pitching the triad notes, and the 2nd one below which incorporates the triad and more complication in rhythm eg. syncopation and dotted rhythms.
Lastly, Resource 3 which includes a range of full exam style sight singing exercises based on all the intervals, triads and rhythm covered in the first two activities.
But there's more.
In this website resource, I have also included 3 tabs (Performance, Composition, Musicology) which cover useful tips to tackle these components. These resources can be used for classwork as well as preparing for the actual HSC exam and composition submission.
Musicology: this tab contains a list of question under each concept of music that students can ask themselves when answering specific questions about duration, pitch, etc. Students are also encouraged to create their own personal concepts mind map based on these questions, to aid them for all musicology tasks.
Composition: this tab is a general guide containing tips for composing the 2 min core comp, as well as specific tips for each instrumental family. They cover the main issues especially when it comes to notation eg. bowing, indicating when to switch instruments, contemporary notation etc. These tips are a compilation of my own experiences as well as notes I took from Carl Vine's Instrumentation and Orchestration class in first year.
Performance: Performance advice is personal as it differs for each student and circumstance. Tips for performance is best given through individual sessions with the classroom teacher or instrumental tutor and class performances. However, under this tab, I also included a general list of things to be aware of when choosing repertoire, practising and what to do on the day of the performance.