I was taught to sing melodies at sight from an early age. I have met several newly trained singers recently who have very real problems with doing this. Why? Is sight singing not taught well these days? Come, ye teachers of the voice and tell me what you do. I am a puzzled old Henry. (Does anyone remember Henry's House?)

I don't know its particularly limited to singers. I know people who are technically far more capable than me at a keyboard instrument, but I can often make a vaguely musical approximation far more quickly.

The only real sight singing I've had has been via choirs rather than singing lessons, although I didn't have any singing lessons until I was at a reasonably advanced stage.

I think sight reading exposure on other instruments helps a lot - my viola teacher at school was quite keen on arranging little quartet/quintet things, where you'd be dumped on a part on your own and it was very much sink or swim, or at least play the first note of each bar.

I try to teach my students to sightsing, but some (thankfully a minority) blatanly refuse. I'll never get why they have this "I-can-be-a-good-singer-without-any-other-musicianship-skills"-attitude. Yes, of course you can, but knowing about all the supporting subjects makes life so much easier.

As for learning to sightsing/read at school: Don't ask. Most of my teenage students, even the ones who do their Highers in Music, don't learn anything apart from doing listening exercises and ticking multiple choice boxes. I think that's actually quite a shame. You are literally forced these days to take private music/theory lessons if you want to advance a bit further.

I'm not a teacher of voice, but I learned to sight sing through a series of books published by Trinity called "Sound at Sight" - these use doh, ray me, etc and start with a three note tune in C and add more notes one at a time, then moving onto other keys. Worked fot me.

I routinely teach sight-singing to those who don't already know how to do it (unless I'm working on a specific problem with a major recording artist, in which case it's not really pertinent).

I recommend systematically the Kodaly approach now for people to improve their musicianship.

I cannot imagine how to teach it without using solfa...

I had singing lessons for 3 years before uni and then whilst at uni, and no-one EVER mentioned how to sight-sing. I bought myself the Mike Brewer books on sight-reading and plodded through them. What did work was singing in the cathedral choir and (later) having a choral scholarship at uni - being forced to sight-sing, often in performance, four or five times a week was very useful!

I sight-read in a slightly odd way, though - when it's working properly (depends how "in practice" I am ) I look at the music, think "up a fourth, that's the Allegri Miserere interval" and sing it. This makes me very good at weird modern stuff with horrible intervals (I grew up singing Britten and Bartok and things) but Handel, Mozart etc are a bit more of a puzzle!

I made the most progress at sight-singing when I had a choral scholarship, though - if you have 45 minutes to rehearse and there's 60 minutes' worth of music in a service, then your definition of a good choir director changes to "someone who knows what it's safe to leave you to sight-read in performance"! Although there was one day when the music was moved/taken (I really can't imagine why someone would steal it) in between the rehearsal and the service and we ended up having to sight-read something without having any music, which unfortunately wasn't a trick that ANY of us could pull off!

I'm terrible at sight-singing! When I did my grade 5 exam a few years ago we did the sight singing bit once and it was awful. He gave me the second attempt and then stopped half way through and said, 'shall we just leave it there?'!!! It was a little embarrassing at the time!!