Blog

  • Memorisation & Music Learning

    An important aspect of any musicianship, music literacy or music aural and music theory work we do is memorisation. This is where you memorise a specific concept or element (e.g. scales or chords etc.) or activity (e.g. a melody or rhythm etc). The obvious reason for doing this is so that the information is there, in your […]


  • Lean Forward!

    Just a quick post from me today (am in the middle of writing the 2nd Edition of the Level 3 books, CDs etc ready for 2017!) I came across this action song when my daughter sang it ALL the way home in the car (it’s an hour drive!!!) I can’t find the source of the […]


  • Movement Activities for Older Students

    I frequently teach older students (17 and 18 year olds) for long periods of time at a stretch. I want to break up these sessions with activities to keep their concentration levels up, but don’t want to let them take a real break as they tend to take twice as long as I allow (“I […]


  • How to Extend Your Most Musical Students

    Something I love about teaching music literacy, musicianship, aural and theory using the Kodály method is how easy it is to create extension ideas and activities suitable for the HUGE range of student abilities within our classes. As any music teacher who has taught the first year of high school will know, our student’s abilities […]


  • Teaching Key Signatures by Jeremy Howard

      Sound before symbol!  Welcome to our very first guest post, kindly written and shared by Jeremy Howard. Jeremy is a Kodály teacher in Kentucky, USA. You can follow Jeremy’s fantastic Kentucky Kodály Classroom blog here.Thanks so much Jeremy! Teaching key signatures can be difficult since there is no associative “sound”. How does one then teach key […]


  • Jumbala Lyala – a new game for 3 metre

    Have you noticed that, in Western cultures, we don’t sing a lot of songs in 3 metre?This means our students find it hard to use 3 metre for composing and improvising, as well as transcribing, as it is not part of their regular music language. I originally created these actions to highlight the accents in […]


  • Taba Naba – traditional song, new game!

    It’s usually around this time of the year that I start getting bored with the games I am using with my Year 7 & 8 classes. (Note that I say “I get bored – not THEY get bored? We get tired of things much faster than our students do. Still it’s nice for us to […]