Reading Music, Reading Words

There is all kinds of reading going on at my house. Being an avid readers ourselves, my husband and I have tried to encourage that in our children. Now they can't go to bed without piles of books by their beds. Our youngest, in kindergarten, is learning to read right now. I've taken a more active role over the past couple of weeks in reading with him because I found out from his teacher that he is lagging behind most of his classmates in reading skills. It's not a lack of intelligence, it's a lack of reinforcing at home. Mom has been so (too?) busy. Sigh. I've noticed his reading getting better, though, as we have just spent time reading daily through some simple books I check out every week from his teacher. Our favorite game that elicits the most giggles is to read the simple sentence the correct direction and then read it again with the words in reverse order. Liam laughs and laughs. It's a great game because then we can see which words he really knows and which ones he says because he's memorized the sentence order.

Teaching students to read music is a similar sort of skill. We teach them to read note by note at first, and where I have noticed some students really struggle is learning to read musical "words" -- seeing a measure as a complete whole, or being able to glance at a chord and recognize all of the notes right away instead of having to painstakingly "sound out" each note. I'm trying to work more and more with my students on reading complete words and even seeing a bit beyond the words to the whole musical sentence, or phrase. It's exciting work. And just like learning to read books, there are students who pick up quickly on these skills, while others take much longer. And just like with reading books, the ones who have the reinforcement and encouragement from parents or siblings at home progress faster than those are plug along by themselves.

Good parenting requires the best of everything we have/know/are to give our children, and it's certainly not money (although, I have to admit, that certainly takes the burden off some things!). Maybe one day I will finally internalize this lesson instead of having to relearn it over new things all the time.