Here’s a brilliant resource from Pianimation that I use all the time with my beginner piano students. They are Sightreading Pattern Cards, and they help students to learn to read intervalically, focusing on notes that are the same, a step up or down, and a skip up or down. Here’s an example:
Example of a sight-reading pattern flashcard available from Pianimation.
As you can see, the patterns are five notes in length. The full five-line staff is not needed or used, and there are no treble clefs or bass clefs. This focuses the student’s attention on the relationship from one note to the next. The notes are big and clear to read. Students also have to take notice of which hand to use and which finger to put on the starting note, avoiding the trap of students putting their hands into the wrong hand position (e.g. C position or G position).
Tips for teaching students to recognise steps and skips
Firstly, ensure students know where the high and low notes are on the piano, and can aurally distinguish high and low sounds. For young students, I’ll have them face away from the piano, and I’ll play either a very high or very low note, and get them to raise their hands in the air, or crouch low to the ground.
Secondly, have the student play up and down in steps on the piano, then up and down in skips. Clarify that only the white notes are in use, not the black notes. You could give the student a series of instructions such as, ‘Play middle C for me, go up a step, go up a skip, go down a step. What note did we end on?’
Thirdly, introduce the student to the staff, and have them place markers showing steps and skips going up or down. Here are a couple of games you can use:
At this stage, they should be well and truly ready to look a the sight-reading pattern cards mentioned above. I start with the steps set of flashcards, noting how they go from space to line or vice versa.
Skips are copycats
Moving on to the skips set of flashcards, I’ll help the student notice that notes which are a skip apart go from line to line, or from space to space. In doing so, we can call them ‘copycats.’
As students advance in their reading ability, they’ll learn what particular intervals look like, all the way up to an octave. Once, one of my students was reading a piece of music particularly slowly, and I saw that she was trying to recognise each note before playing it. I told her that she didn’t need to, that she could just recognise (in this particular instance), that all the intervals that were slowing her down were octaves. She just needed to read one note, instead of both. Immediately, she was able to play the piece faster.
Incorporating sight-reading into the lesson
Aim to devote a few minutes of each lesson to sight-reading. Beyond the aforementioned pattern cards from Pianimation, I use resources from a variety of sources, including the excellent, published sight-reading series by Paul Harris.
Download
The steps and skips flashcards are available from the Pianimation website. Scroll down till you find ‘Sightreading Pattern Cards (PreReading)’.
There are plenty of other resources there that are worth exploring.
