Meanest Teacher Part???

My newest mean and cruel, but totally fun and helpful teaching strategy:
SOLFEGE WITH HAND SIGNS.

Seriously, I am loving this and can't believe I didn't do this earlier.

For years I've meant to get better at the hand signs, but it just didn't happen.  The kids learned the scale at the beginning of the year in choir class, so sometimes I would review it with them in lessons, but I never really used the hand signs as part of their sight-reading.  This year, I changed that.  At almost every lesson this year, we've done something with solfege and hand signs.  The kids are improving and since I practice with every lesson, every day, I'm getting better too.  Plus, the kids get to see me make mistakes and improve along with them and I think that helps a lot.  They know that they don't have to be perfect, they just have to keep working on it and keep improving.

This week, I made it harder.  Many of the kids are learning new songs, so not only did we learn the melody by singing on solfege, we did hand signs as we sang.  First we slowly sang on solfege with the hand signs.  Then when a phrase was pretty secure that way, we sang the real words and kept the hand signs going.  There has been lots of laughter and no tears, so I think that even though it is hard, this is a good thing.  We are learning together.