I want to use solfege with my classes, and for the returning students, it has been introduced. Unfortunately, about 2/3rds of my third and fourth grade class are new to our school.
What are strategies that have worked for introducing solfege to students who have no prior learning, especially when they should be beyond the sol/mi stage?
--Kate
Hey Kate,
ReplyDeleteMy students all had solfege before I started, but I do have some ideas based on what I gathered from Kodaly this summer.
With older-beginners, it's a better idea to start with mi-re-do, and then add sol and la later to complete the pentatonic. This is better for many reasons:
1) students pick up on the concept faster, and when you can include the idea of "do" as a basis, it makes a little more sense to them (everything else builds off of "do")
2) sol-mi-la songs are Baby-ish and your older students won't like them. There are many more songs that may be pentatonic throughout, but that highlight mi-re-do "cadences" or sections. (one example might be "over in the meadow" or "no one in the house but dinah" or "great big house in new orleans"). That way, you can advance to more complicated rhythms if you want to, but you aren't getting carried away with the pitch difficulty and overwhelming them.
3) definitely use the visual element of solfege to your advantage... that's part of the whole point of using it. Explain the hand signs as a type of "musical sign language." I've also seen visual aids like "The Melody Arms" and "Solfege Street" where you can show all the pitches, but highlight the ones you are using in a special way. That definitely helps.
4) The main thing is to work with inner-hearing. if you have older students who study piano (maybe with you!) they might question why they can't just know "it's in the key of G" and forget about the solfege. It's all about being able to hear what "m-r-d" sound like together and in different combinations and to be able to hear when they are sounding. That's how you become able to create your own music, whether it's composing or improvising. It's not just "well, this just sounded good and I got lucky" but it becomes "I knew that would be a great ending for my improv because i could already hear what it was going to sound like in my head." Where did that ability come from? SOLFEGE!!
Hope that gave some food-for-thought!
Katie, you are super smart. Thanks :)
ReplyDeleteKatie, What's "melody arms"? Is it like body solfege?
ReplyDelete-kate
Oh, sorry! It's like "solfege street" but it's an apartment building tower. So each step is a different "floor"... it's nice because it's shows more of a "ladder" in a traditional way. Although, I guess studies show that students understand progression/lists better if they're written in a flow-map form horizontally. But that's a whole other tangent ;)
ReplyDeleteDo you have the story for Melody arms?
ReplyDelete