I am new to teaching and am hoping someone could give me the benefit of their experience.

Have any of you had students who are very good at the aural side of things eg they memorise and transpose easily and seem to be learning their pieces by ear and/or rote but struggle with notation? I teach a very musical little boy but he struggles with reading the notes. As a child I was the exact opposite - I sped through all my pieces because I was so good at reading but later on my aural hadn't developed at the same rate and it held me back. I feel I might get pressure from his parents later because he hasn't gone through the method book/got to grade 1 as quickly as his peers but I also don't want to stifle his natural abilities and if he is playing by ear so easily I want to develop that too. I am using a modern method book that does have lots of aural exercises but I do worry that there is still so much emphasis on being able to read music that students who find this difficult get easily discouraged.

Hi, you don't mention this students age, but I'm guessing he is quite young.

The important thing here is not to make a huge deal about it, keep plugging away at it, but subtly, do a small piece of sightreading every time, always ask him to read a new piece first in very small chunks. I have found some similarly gifted students will be able to copy me immediately from a demo, so just be aware of that.

But most important is keep it fun - improvisation is great for this kind of student, and keep the parents informed, if they know that this is the way you are going and can see him doing other musically related things, they won't hastle.

It won't necessarily delay his grade 1 and he will probably do very well as he will have the pieces memorised and the aural will be fine, with the sightreading, I teach alot by shape, so if he can tell that it goes up a third he will find it easier than reading C then E so just needs to work out where to start.

My son sounds very similar to your pupil... I don't know what you teach, but my son's teacher transferred him onto the jazz syllabus... where reading is less of an issue. I would like him to do more reading exercises... but in the jazz syllabus even the quick study (sight reading equivalent) can be done by ear. The improvising is enjoyable too. I do worry that my son can get an AB exam without having to read any music!!!!! He does has dyspraxia though... which is probably why he struggles with written notation (however, he found normal reading a doddle.... reading music must use the maths side of his brain... as he struggles with maths big time). Does your pupil have a specific learning difficulty? If he does, he can get dispensations in exams (3 mins not 30 secs for sight reading, extra time for scales etc).
My own pupils who aren't so good at sight reading just get a little chunk every lesson.... The "improve your sightreading books" are good for this. I just try not to get too bogged down in reading notation as I don't want to put them off for life. They do improve over time. However, none of my pupils struggle as much as my son... so maybe the jazz syllabus is just a way for him to enjoy music.

Hi Kate Bush fan - welcome . I think it's tryue to say that this is not an uncommon problem. If you think of the act of reading music as a sort of circuit then you can see there are actually quite a number of places where the circuitry can break . With students like this I first and foremost give them plenty of chances to enjoy their musicality and put it to work for them in rewarding ways but I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't teach note reading as well. (I think...)

Anyway try to get to the bottom of where the disconnects are for him. Is it the link between the notes on the stave and the note letter names they represent? Or does he struggle with findnig / producing those notes on the instrument? For sightreading it is really useful to be able to sight sing (I am assuming you are an instrumental teacher not voice). So can he sing the patterns on the music? Work on this perhaps if not - because once he can hear the music inside, and he has with you developed his playing by ear, he may well be able to sightread as well as anyone else.

In terms of matching the notes on the stave to the letter names I wish I had a way of learning this which didn't involve just, uh, going away and learning them (like times tables for example) but so far I haven't come up with anything. There are plenty of fun worksheets involving cracking codes or you could design your own. Also the one minute club - is this a suzuki idea? - where you give them 60 seconds to name the stave notes on flashcards over one or two octaves, and then they can have a certificate once they do it.

I'm sure you'll get a lot of ideas from this forum! Good luck - and have fun!

Huge caveat here, because I'm not a teacher, but thinking of some of the stuff I've been doing recently and how it's made me approach things differently how about trying it the other way around. What I mean is playing a very simple one or two bar phrase - just crotchets/minims maybe and only 2 or 3 notes, getting your student to learn it (sounds as though that will be a doddle) then asking him to write it down and showing him how what he hears looks like when it's notated. This could lead on to homework of making up and writing down e.g. a 4 bar melody, possibly explaining why what he's written and what he's playing are different etc

If this sounds hugely overcomplicated and difficult then please just ignore!

I was going to say something similar - you could encourage him to compose something, and then write it down. I find that they often write down the correct notes but not the correct rhythm. I tend to let this go, as I don't want to stifle them in any way. I always make sure they play correct rhythms from notation.

Also he could learn a new piece (simple one) by ear, and then write it down - in which case I would make sure the rhythms are correct.

When you think about it we learn to read words by writing as them well as reading them, and it is strange that most people don't approach reading music in the same way.

I was going to say something similar - you could encourage him to compose something, and then write it down.

I try this from time to time, and did it recently with a new student. She had made up a tune of her own based on ACE (she'd kept the A in the LH but moved the RH up so that after four repeats of ACE we then had ADF x 4 then AEG and finally AFA - "I'm back to A now so I'll stop".

Sounded quite effective so I thought we would try writing it down - we hadn't done any music reading at this stage. She had the last line to complete over half term. It will be interesting to see whether the reading takes off any differently when we start a book.

Regarding the original post, I would have plenty of material on hand at every stage and be prepared to go with the tunes that take off - never mind if the actual reading difficulty is not moving forward all the time. I have one bright little girl who has been learning for 2 years, and has always found reading the notes very tricky - like your pupil she has a good ear. She has found that labelling the lines with numbers on each stave outwards from middle C works for her, and she now finds her start note by counting out "zero (on C) 1 2 3 4 5" in the appropriate direction. She knows the names on the keyboard reasonably well, but letter names on the stave don't really work for her (mum and dad have tried to help in the past by using FACE etc). She can read small intervals fairly well, although sometimes needs reminding to think of them, and we've had to do lots of reinforcement at every step of the way. She did her first proper sight-reading excercise (ie a complete line from a sight-reading book) a couple of weeks ago and that was a real step forward for her.

Thanks a lot for all your advice. I had been doing a lot of this instinctively - like the improvisation but it is good to know that other people are doing similar things and I am not on the completely wrong track. I like the transcribing idea - I had thought this was probably a bit advanced for him but I will give it a go - he often suprises me with what he finds easy and what he finds difficult.





What do you do if a piece doesn't take off? I was thinking with the method book that often a child finds one piece hard or it just doesn't appeal to them but they take to the next piece. How insistent are you that they can play the earlier piece correctly before they go to the next one. I do use lots of material outside the method book too but even when I use other pieces I notice the child and perhaps even the parent don't think these pieces are as important as getting through those in the method book.

What do you do if a piece doesn't take off? I was thinking with the method book that often a child finds one piece hard or it just doesn't appeal to them but they take to the next piece. How insistent are you that they can play the earlier piece correctly before they go to the next one ?

It's a good question. Not as insistent as I used to be. I don't think "getting bogged down" teaches anybody much at all, except perhaps that music is boring and I've gradually got much less tough on finishing every piece. I find generally that the piece that doesn't take off in the first week or two rarely does so later. These days I tend to explore pieces briefly to give pupils plenty of choice, and I try to work on the ones that seem to appeal.

I'm not happy about leaving things unfinished on the whole - but if I feel we have got all we are going to get out of it, I usually find a reason to move on. If the pupil can get through it in a fairly basic way, I feel has made some effort, and is clearly not enjoying it, we usually agree to give it a "small tick" and leave it.

If it pertains to some important point in the tutor book I make a note that I need to find something else and approach that point in perhaps a different way another time. And of course if the next couple of pages in the book build on that piece you probably need to find other things to reinforce before moving on. If most pieces are ending up as "barely finished" though I need to make the point eventually and perhaps be a bit less lenient.

An idea I picked up from Philip Johnston's Practice Spot website was to award an extra credit for the pieces that are particularly well completed. (Yes we use stickers too but they don't seem to act as much of a carrot, although they are regarded by most as quite nice to get). The idea is you collect the credits and when you have so many your name goes on the credit chart. (You decide what to call them and how many are needed) With these I find that pupils tend to keep playing the pieces they like long after they get a tick for them, and then will sometimes ask to play them again a few weeks later - and surprise me. I have found this very useful with a number of younger pupils.

Don't know if any of this helps. It does vary a lot from pupil to pupil - some will "go off" almost every piece they start given half a chance! Others don't like leaving a piece half-finished, and seem to take a while to get into a new piece but get there in the end. I don't claim to have all the answers - or even a few percent of them.

By the way I don't find that piece books are regarded as different from course books - or I haven't picked that up. I do like pupils to have more than one thing on the go at any one time, if possible pieces at varying stages of completion, and preferably from different books.

I like to do this too but I have a couple at the moment who really will only cope with one thing at a time and one whose parents as extremely reluctant to buy books so having a variety is not much of an option.

One idea I have used quite a lot is to put 5 lines of masking tape on the floor quite widely spaced apart so little feet can fit comfortably inbetween them! Then we can "walk%

One idea I have used quite a lot is to put 5 lines of masking tape on the floor quite widely spaced apart so little feet can fit comfortably inbetween them! Then we can "walk" up the stave (use ribbons to make treble or bass clefs), name the notes, spell out words / songs / etc. There is a whole host of activities that you can do really. Have to credit this idea to a session on Dyslexia that was part of my CT course - all of my pupils have really enjoyed the activities we have done, and it does help to cement note names, and the idea of pitch going higher or lower etc

Yes - I sympathise. One book is a bit limiting for many students isn't it ? And yes, the "one thing at a time" pupils - I get a few of those too, and I have to remind myself - variety doesn't seem to help.