Adolescent Singing: Gamify Your Approach!

• Karen Stafford
• Posted 11/23/21
• 0 comments

Be Playful, but Give Ownership While Teaching

Teaching singing to adolescents has become a considerable frustration. It was challenging getting the males in my upper elementary classes to take singing seriously or to sing, period. I realized that I needed to make things competitive.

Nagging didn’t work. Ignoring student behavior was ineffective. Proximity while singing in their ears did not prompt any change.

I needed to change my approaches. My goal was to pass ownership of musicality to the students. I believed that once they felt ownership, classroom management would improve. It did!

Football was a very popular sport in my district, with many of my fifth- and sixth-grade boys participating in a junior league. I designed a Vocal Football bulletin board as an incentive to encourage singing by my students.

Vocal Football

Each student initialed a little paper jersey, and I kept them in envelopes with students’ classroom teachers’ names. Here is how I structured the game.

• Students would volunteer to sing a simple phrase or solfege pattern.
• If they passed the rubric, their shirt would go on the 50-yard line.
• Each successive phrase would become more complex until they were ready for the touchdown, generally a phrase from a song.
• If they made a touchdown, they earned a certificate and a piece of candy.
• They could progress to the Vocal Football Superbowl using paper footballs with their names if they wanted to.
• All the selections for this round were song phrases.

Solfege Shuffle

To play “Solfege Shuffle,” you will need the colored floor discs from P.E. supply stores or make and laminate your own.

• Write solfa syllables on each disc.
• Place the discs in a descending pattern on the floor.
• “The conductor” conducts the class by jumping on various discs.
• The rest of the class sings the pattern “the conductor” indicates using the correct solfege pitches.

Singing Yarn Spiderweb

Some teachers use a skein of yarn to encourage class discussion. I adapted this teaching approach to encourage singing.

Students sing one solfege syllable on a major scale and then toss the yarn to another student to sing the second pitch. If the students weren’t quite on the pitch, a few students would sing along to help their peers match the correct pitch.

Other Tricks I Have Discovered

Assigning students jobs for performances increases student ownership. Assign one student to be the listener. The listener reports what they hear during a rehearsal and provide constructive criticism. This provides insight into what your students understand about the music and performance expectations.

Exit tickets also provide excellent insight into student learning. Students can summarize what they did well and where they believe improvement is needed. Seesaw is an online portfolio platform that is an excellent way to save student information.

When I first started working with students in early adolescence, I was terrified. However, once I learned to embrace their quirks and identified ways to navigate the musical issues of pre-teens, I fell in love with my fifth and sixth graders. The same is true for seventh- and eighth-grade students. Finding whys to accommodate students’ singing reluctance and ways to make them feel more comfortable changed my teaching for the better.

References

Cooksey, J.M. (1999). Working with adolescent voices. Concordia Publishing House.

Hernandez, D. (n.d.). Why are more children going through puberty at a younger age? Texas A&M Today. https://today.tamu.edu/2018/01/11/why-are-more-children-going-through-puberty-at-a-younger-age/

Huff-Gackle, L. (1985). The young adolescent female voices (ages 11-15): Classification, placement, and development of tone. The Choral Journal, (25), 8, 15-18. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23546818.

Killian, J. (1999). A description of vocal maturation among fifth- and sixth-grade boys. Journal of Research in Music Education. (47)4, 357-369