Great ensembles sight read regularly. Sight reading helps students improve their musical literacy and connects notation to performance. Obviously, spending time on this valuable skill pays off when your ensemble goes to a sight reading contest. It also pays dividends every day, and especially in your concert preparation. The more effectively students are able to process musical material, the more efficiently you’ll be able to improve.

There are many ways to practice sight reading and work it into your lesson planning.  However, one common obstacle is finding fresh repertoire! The more you want to sight read, the more music you’ll need to put in front of students.

SmartMusic’s free version has hundreds of sight reading exercises you can access, practice, and assign to students. We’ve built a free lesson plan that uses these exercises in conjunction with rhythmic and melodic audiation to help students improve their sight reading. We’ve categorized exercise by level. This makes it easy to customize this plan to match your ensemble’s ability.

This Plan Includes:

• Space for you to customize the plan with your own state standards, extra materials, and supplemental exercises (like from your method book).
• Sequenced activities that naturally lead students from internalizing rhythmic pulse to sight reading complete exercises.
• A suggested homework assignment that also takes advantage of the free content in SmartMusic.

Download the Free Lesson Plan

The plan includes a suggested homework assignment that involves creating a special “sight-reading assignment.” Here’s how to create sight reading assignments in SmartMusic. Like other assignments, you can create a custom rubric to make your assessment more individualized. Here’s how to build a custom rubric.

Again, even if you don’t have SmartMusic today, you can easily get started free and make this the first lesson.