Welcome back to Music Education Basics!

Today, we’re talking about readiness for music-reading and developing proficiency.

Just like learning to read language, music-reading follows listening and responding, developing a musical vocabulary, and active musical experiences in a natural progression, as we’ve been reviewing this week.

If you’re a choir director or an elementary music teacher, I recommend introducing music-reading (as in holding a score in your hand) around 2nd or 3rd grade. We tend to introduce music-reading a little sooner in one-on-one settings — piano lessons or other beginning instrumental studies — but in choir, you can usually wait until 3rd grade and spend more time with rote-learning and gradually bridging that gap.

I’ll walk you through a simple 4-step process and a few tangible ways to do this in today's lesson.

When we learn something by rote, we start by listening, then experiencing it ourselves — imitating what we see or hear, listening again, and repeating it until we can do it on our own.

Today, I want to talk about why rote learning is important and three of the primary benefits of rote learning in music education, and offer some practical, step-by-step techniques for incorporating rote-learning into your teaching approach.