Sight reading advanced literature with your ensemble can help prepare you for contest. It’s also a great way test drive repertoire for next semester’s concert. However, making this sight reading part of a lesson plan helps you connect sight reading to standards. This offers an opportunity to work with students on musical literacy and individual accountability rather than just providing a “reading day.”
It’s easy to become wrapped up in notes and rhythms: the best ensembles also demonstrate great phrasing and dynamics when sight reading. Making these musical elements a key part of your sight-reading practice will help your students sound even better on contest day and improve your concert repertoire as well.
Another great technique for developing sight reading is to push students by having them sight read material that is more challenging. With that in mind, we’ve built a lesson plan that uses medium level standard band repertoire to develop musicality alongside sight-reading practice.
The Plan Includes:
- Space for you to customize the plan with your own state standards and repertoire
- Sequenced sight-reading activities, including sight singing and pitch matching practice
- Suggestions for repertoire available in SmartMusic that you can use to challenge students and develop more musical sight-reading skills
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.
Don’t have SmartMusic? You can easily get started free and use the free sight-reading exercises to get started.