Lessons · Teaching · reading enough notation to teach from it
Enough notation to teach from
You need to read the staff, name notes on the treble clef, know the common note values and their rests, and read a time signature. That is the whole of the notation asked about, and it takes an evening.
Hone is a place to practise a career, one idea a day. This is one of its lessons, written out in full and free to read without an account.
In beta. This lesson was written for Hone and has not yet been checked by a state certification officer. Practice material, not professional advice. What that means.
What it is for
A teacher who cannot read the top line of a song book is limited to whatever they can already sing. Reading a little is the difference between using the resources a school already owns and inventing everything from memory.
How to think about it
Learn the treble clef lines and spaces by any mnemonic you like, then learn the values as halvings: a whole note is two halves, a half is two quarters, a quarter is two eighths. Read a time signature as a count and a unit: the top number is how many beats in a bar and the bottom says what kind of note gets one.
Worked example
Treble clef spaces spell FACE from the bottom; the lines are E, G, B, D, FAny mnemonic works. The point is fluency, not the sentence.
A whole note lasts four beats in common time, a half two, a quarter one, an eighth halfEach value is half the one before it, which is a fraction lesson hiding in a music lesson.
4/4 means four beats in a bar and a quarter note gets oneTop is how many, bottom is which. Once that is fixed, 3/4 and 6/8 follow.
Every note value has a rest of the same length, and a rest is a played silenceChildren treat rests as nothing happening. They are counted exactly as carefully as notes.
Your turn
Name what the top number of a time signature tells you.
The top number is how many are in a bar
Solve one, graded on the server
The trap
Reading the bottom number as a count. In 6/8 there are not eight of anything in the bar. Six of them, and the eight says which kind of note is doing the counting.