Hello Britt,

 

Here is a website that might prove to be very helpful for your singers to use:  http://www.musictheory.net/

 

All the best!

 

Betsy Eickhoff

HI Britt,

You might like to take a look at my method and book on reading rhythm, You've Got Rhythm: Read music better by feeling the beat, developed and co-authored with Juillard-trained pianist/educator Joan Harkness. We and many others have found it somewhat amazingly useful at developing rhythm reading skills in both adults and children very quickly--which also, of course, helps immensely with reading and musicinaship skills in general as well. The method is explained at http://fleap.com/YGR.html

 

you can also look at sample pages from the book there. And please let me know if you have any questions.

 

Good luck,

Anna Dembska

I teach at a community college, and my choirs usually include many who don't read music. I don't use a book, but I teach using movable-do solfege.  We do a few warm-up exercises in solfege to get use to it, and then we start learning our rep. on solfege.  I'll ask them to write the first letter of the syllable for each note for the chunk we are about to rehearse.  There are usually enough students who are musically literate that they help those who are not and it doesn't take much time.  Then we sing on solfege instead of text.  It is a gradual process, and does take a little extra time, but I have found that it does improve their literacy.  Although I was only trying to teach them to read music, what I found was that any piece we learned by spending a lot of time singing it on solfege never had any intonation problems.  If I decided to just teach them the notes and not do solfege, we had to spend time later tuning it up, but the solfege pieces NEVER had intonation problems.

 

Good luck,

Ken

 

"The Independent Singer"  publ. by Kjos - great for this type group.  It's designed for 5 minutes a rehearsal.  If you are consistent, you can teach them to read in one year.

Also the Nancy Telfer sight-singing series.

I suggest you look through the publications of Masterworks Press.  They have numerous offerings that might help.  I developed the Weekly Sight Singer for the type of situation you describe and I had some success using it with my own community chorus.  Also, the University Sight Singer was developed to help bring non-readers up to speed in a choral situation.

Anna Hamre, DMA

Director of Choral Activities

California State University, Fresno

Artistic Director, Fresno Master Chorale