My middle son is in his fourth level of piano books. He has recently been sight reading from his younger brother’s level one books. He can’t sight read from his own books, though he can play the songs with practice.
The fact is, we can all perform music at a much higher level than our reading ability. Successful sight reading lags several steps behind what we can successfully achieve with practice.
How do you deal with this reality?
1. You can program easier music – music that can be sight read well by your students, thus empowering them with successes.
2. You can program harder music, but teach it by rote, while relegating sight reading to an academic task divorced from actual music performance.
3. You can adapt the sight reading to make it easier (generally by changing tempo) to make it more accessible.
But my favorite, learned from my son, is:
4. You can sight read music you’ve already performed, but far enough in the past to have forgotten the details. It feels like sight reading, but it also feels familiar. You are practicing the skills of sight reading, but with a net.
My youngest son brings home books to read every week – a set of books selected for their appropriateness to his current reading ability. And he reads them aloud every single day. Because even though it’s not new, practicing the motions of sight reading helps the skills of sight reading.