If you keep reading, you will get to an excerpt from the introduction page of the AMS Sight Reading Society handbook. Better known as SRS, our Sight Reading Society is a program that teaches all the necessary elements to ensure great sight playing skills. Students collect an AMS key-ring and coloured keys as they progress through each level. Its a winner! Our students LOVE to practice sight reading (have you ever heard of that before?!) and monitor their progress on charts and walls of fame. It has improved sight reading proficiency out of sight.
The AMS Sight reading Society is the program that was the inspiration for ‘How to Blitz Sight Reading’ books which I had the pleasure of co-authoring with Blitzbooks’ Samantha Coates. These books have revolutionised the teaching and practicing of sight reading and we are thrilled that so many teachers & students have responded so passionately about using them.
For lots more musical bits & pieces on theory, musicianship, sight reading and general knowledge – as well as Samantha’s blog, visit www.blitzbooks.com.au
Incidentally, the opening sentence (written by Samantha Coates) is my absolute favourite….
‘We are learning music not just to be clever at something for now, but because we want to have it as a skill for the rest of our lives. Although it’s great to be able to play fast and complicated pieces on our instruments, we also want to be able to accompany our friends on their instruments and to play along at a family sing-a-long!
If you want to be really good at all sorts of music, you need two things: to be able to play by ear and to be able to sight read. All AMS students can play by ear, that’s what we do in class all the time. Now you need to develop your sight reading skills so that you can play just about anything at any time you want to.
Learning to read music fast is just the same as the way we learn to read English fast. Do you remember learning to read in Kindergarten? You had lots of different readers to take home. The reason you got better and better at reading fluently was because you practised by reading all sorts of different books.
Well, it’s the same with music… you won’t get better at reading music by playing the same pieces over and over. You need to read different pieces all the time. Sight reading is a special skill that needs a special sort of practise, one that is different from the type of practice we usually do for an exam or an eisteddfod.’
And the results speak for themselves….
