5 Essential Questions Before Teaching Older Students with the Kodály Approach

Helen Russell 26 May 2022

Here are five essential questions you need to ask yourself, before starting older students with the singing based Kodály approach.

Whether it’s in a piano or other instrumental lesson, a singing lesson or in a class setting, this topic crops up all the time during my coaching calls inside the Doremi Membership.

Key Questions:

How old are they? Primary, tweens, teenagers, adults?
What level are they? Young beginner, older beginner, intermediate or advanced, transfer students
What are their strengths and weaknesses? Pulse, rhythm, pitch awareness, reading, musical phrasing, theory, key signatures, scales, aural exam preparation?
What is your goal? Why Kodály? You’ll have more success and add more value if you have a clear goal in mind.
How much time have you got? How long are lessons and what else do you need to cover in that time? Is there an upcoming performance or exam, or are they changing teacher soon?

Categories: Music Teaching, Piano Teaching

Tags: doremi, education, kodaly, music, older, singing, teaching

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Empowering children to sing. Games to help children explore their voices

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In the last blog post (catch-up here), we talked about the qualities of speaking and singing and what the differences are. To help our students learn the difference between their speaking and singing voices they need to feel free and able to experiment with their voices. So how do we give them confidence and encouragement to experience their voice types?

Whether you’re a classroom teacher, visiting music teacher or 1:1 instrumental teacher, this blog will give you tips and ideas for experiencing voice types in a Kodály inspired way.

Joanne Raffle 4 February 2024

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Which Solfa to Start with in Kodály Music Lessons

So know you want to teach using solfa, and you know that throwing them into the full diatonic scale is not the best way. But which subset of the tones, or toneset, do you teach first? Get ready for some controversy!

Helen Russell 16 June 2022

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Key Questions:

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