Blog entry 11.6.17: Using real excerpts from topic pieces as aural dictation.
A focus of my unit has been devising aural dictations from key musical ideas in chosen topic pieces. I am planning to use these as starter activities as a way of introducing melodic, rhythmic, harmonic ideas from the pieces. Students are actively engaged in analysing, understanding and remembering small excerpts, to then link with the follow on activity, using the same topic piece. I’ve used a variety of methods to scaffold the aural dictation learning process. Initially just allowing dictation of rhythmic or melodic patterns, asking students to first sing or clap back patterns to cement the auralisation process prior to notating. Also checking in during listening’s to help make sure they are on the right path and identifying what strategies each of the students are using to memorise, auralise and notate the dictation.
Sight singing is also an important aspect of auralising and so far I need to include a little more in my unit. I have lots of opportunities for sight-reading with instruments and improvisation, but do need to include a little more sight singing to help reverse engineer the aural dictation process. I’ve linked some of my draft scores for dictation below.
I'm testing Google Sites as a digital portfolio option which so far is going ok. However it is difficult to just add in sound (similar to Google Slides) and I have to upload any sound file I need, like aural dictaitons, into Youtube, to then embed them into Google Sites. Linking in however other items such as pdf or Google Docs is very easy and I'm finding great way to collate documents for a unit. Therefore i've just put in a Google Drive link below if you'd like to download any interesting dictations - much easier alternative!