A great thing about belonging to a professional music teacher’s association is the chance to exchange ideas with colleagues. This week I was honoured to be the presenter at an Information Sharing Session of the Ottawa Branch of the Ontario Registered Music Teachers’ Association. It’s an informal forum to share teaching ideas.
Lately I’ve been studying up on how students acquire their aural music skills. I’ve been reading Aural Skills Acquisition and Manual for Ear Training and Sight Singing, both by Gary S. Karpinski. He’s been researching the topic of aural skills acquisition for the last twenty years. I found out that some of my hunches about how students learn (or where they run into difficulty) are backed by solid research. I’ve also found some great activities for teaching these skills. You’ll hear us sight singing in solfege and chanting a rhythm solfege called Takadimi. I’ve been amazed with student progress to date.