58: Singing 101 for Homeschoolers: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Learning to Sing at Home!

In this enlightening episode of the "Music in Our Homeschool" podcast, host Gena Mayo dives deep into the art of singing with "Singing for Homeschoolers 101: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Learning to Sing at Home!" With over 30 years of music teaching experience and a passion for homeschooling her own eight children, Gena offers practical, hands-on advice designed to make music education accessible and enjoyable for homeschooling families.

Discover the essentials of teaching singing at home, ranging from recognizing pitch and maintaining a steady beat to understanding the nuances of breathing and posture. Gena emphasizes the importance of developing a relaxed body as an instrument and the significance of clear diction, exploring how these elements contribute to better singing.

Whether you have young children with unchanged voices or teenagers experiencing voice changes, Gena shares tailored advice to support their musical journey. Learn how to choose age-appropriate songs that foster vocal development without strain. Gena also highlights the importance of expression in music, encouraging students to consider song style, dynamics, and tempo for a more impactful performance.

Considering voice lessons? Gain insights into the optimal timing for starting formal training and how to select a trustworthy teacher or course suitable for your child's age and vocal maturity. Whether you're seeking resources for preschoolers or high school singers, this episode is packed with tips to help you incorporate a quality music education into your homeschooling curriculum.

Join Gena for this valuable discussion, and feel empowered to bring the joy of singing into your home. Perfect for homeschoolers who aim to nurture a love for music in their children, this episode will guide you every step of the way!

Find all links to resources mentioned in this episode here: https://musicinourhomeschool.com/singing-101-for-homeschoolers/

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Transcript

58: Singing for Homeschoolers 101: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Learning to Sing at Home!

[00:00:00] Hi, this is Gena Mayo from Music in Our Homeschool and I'm thrilled to be talking today about how to teach your kids to sing in your homeschool. So a little bit about me. I have a degree in music education. I taught junior high choir for a few years and elementary music. And then I had my kids and I have been homeschooling. I have eight children. My oldest are graduated. I have one who is married. 

I am loving the fact that I can help homeschoolers teach music in their homeschools because I know that this is a difficult topic for a lot of you. If you haven't learned how to teach music, you probably don't know where to start. And there are a lot of resources out there. One of the things that I try to do is do a lot of reviews of different resources so you can pick and choose what is best for your style, [00:01:00] for your homeschool, for your kids. 

Right now I am focusing a lot on how to teach singing. I've done a lot for music history, music appreciation, some simple instruments like bucket drumming and things like that. But right now I've been focusing on teaching singing. And so that's what I want to help you with. today. 

Let me start with the basics of singing and then I will give you some tips on how to teach it in your own homeschool. One of the very basics for singing is that you want to listen to the music and match the pitch. This comes about through listening, through focused listening, sometimes asking your kids to pay attention to some music or listen to the birds outside or recognize certain animals like frogs that we hear outside in our pond. [00:02:00] Sometimes we have the green frogs and the bullfrogs. We want to start using our ears to distinguish sounds. And then that will actually help when you're singing to listen and be able to use your ears to match pitch and tone quality and different things like that. 

Another part of music is steady beat. Making sure that you can keep a steady beat. A really great way to do this is just to play some music that has a strong steady beat like maybe a John Philip Sousa march and then just play it on a wooden spoon and a pan or if you have any instruments at home, a little hand drum or something like that. Or if you make maracas with the plastic spoons and rice inside, you could shake those to a steady beat. So that will be really helpful when you start singing as well. 

Another thing you want to know about singing [00:03:00] is that you, your body, is the instrument. So you need to be relaxed. You need to understand how to recognize tension. And it can be in all parts of your body that can affect your voice. It could be in your jaw, your tongue, in your lips. Any part of your face, your neck, your shoulders, your chest, your stomach, because you need to be able to breathe. And we'll get to breathing in a minute. But you want to make sure that all of this apparatus is loose.

When you're standing, which is a good way to practice singing, make sure you're not locking your knees. You're standing real strong, but knees are a little loose. Shoulders are back and down and you have tall posture because that will allow you to be able to breathe correctly. And when you breathe, you want to not just breathe with your chest. You want the air to go all [00:04:00] the way down to the bottom of your lungs. And if you put your hands at the bottom of your ribcage, you can feel your lungs go way down there. And in between your ribcage, there's a muscle called the diaphragm. And you want to be able to use that muscle. It will lower when you take breath in. And that way you can get a full breath all the way down to the bottom of your lungs. And that will help you to get strength because you're you're strengthening those muscles there. And you're also going to be able to have enough air to last throughout an entire phrase. So that is a very important thing for singing, to know how to breathe correctly.

Next I want to talk about how to have clear diction. Diction with singing comes with how you are shaping your lips and your tongue for certain vowel sounds. And then, making sure that you're getting those consonant sounds in there [00:05:00] as well. The vowel sound is how you sustain the tone while you're singing, and then the consonants are so you can understand what word you're talking about. 

A lot of vocal warm ups you've heard probably, La la la la la la la la la, different vocal warm ups like that. They will help you practice with vowel sounds, ahhh, ehhh, eeee, ohhh, oooo And notice I'm having a lot of space inside my mouth for all of those vowel sounds. You don't want to scrunch down real tight. Remember what I said about being loose and open. And your throat and your neck is loose and your throat is open. So that you have lots of space. sound that can flow out in the breath too. And then you have a beautiful tone quality on those vowel sounds when you're sustaining them, like Laaaa, like that. 

And [00:06:00] then you want to, as you're singing those vocal warmups, you want to be listening to the pitch and making sure you are exactly in the middle of each of those pitches. 

Now, let me talk a second about boys and when they have unchanged voices, when they're changing, and when they have changed voices. So boys with unchanged voices, which will be little boys all the way up until they are completed their voice change, sometime in puberty, which can happen between like 11 and 17. There's a range for different boys of when that is going to be happening, how long it takes for the transition, and when it is complete.

But boys, before that happens, have exactly the same range as a girl or a woman. And that is basically middle C to high C. That is the limited part of the range. And a lot [00:07:00] of people can go lower and higher, but for children, we usually want to stay within middle C to high C. Just that octave.

And boys sometimes. feel like they are singing too high and they sound like a girl. So you want to encourage them when they are singing not to feel embarrassed about that. Help them to do sirens and to let their voice go up high. So they know that that is their natural voice at that point. And if they're feeling embarrassed, that their voice is high or they sound like a girl or they sound like their mom, just reassure them, "Your voice will change and you will be singing lower than me. But right now, this is the way God made our voices and this is the way you should sing because you will learn the proper techniques and relaxation and posture and breathing and vowel [00:08:00] structure with your mouth and diction." You want to learn that even when their voices haven't changed. 

Okay, then, when their voices start to change, often, what happens is it gets very narrow and they can't sing very much. They can't sing very many notes. They, are struggling. It will crack. It will, sometimes when they're singing, they will get embarrassed because It will squeak or, or crack and just encourage them that they will get through this. It's the same for almost every boy and then they will get to the point where that range that they had from C to C drops an octave and now they have the lower voice and now they can sing low and you want to encourage them to sing low and to stretch their range, of course. 

But if boys are trying to sing low [00:09:00] before their voices have changed, they actually might hurt their vocal folds. They might actually be straining and literally they cannot sing that low. And so they'll get frustrated because they can't get those pitches out. So just remind them to go up high. That's what you want to encourage with your boys when they are learning to sing when they're young. 

Now what I want to talk about when you're learning to sing is phrasing. So if you look at a piece of music, often you'll see sentences because songs are poems and if it's not a full sentence then often it will at least have a comma and that will tell you where the end of a phrase is and where you will want to breathe. You don't want to breathe in the middle of a word. Usually you don't. Maybe it's a very long word on a lot of different notes and that's different. But if it's It's a typical [00:10:00] song, you wouldn't want to breathe in the middle of a word, so you'll have to find the best places to breathe, especially if you cannot make it to the end of a phrase. 

If you can't make it to the period or to the comma of that sentence, then you want to find the best, most logical place to take a breath. And if you can make it to a period or a comma or a rest. Sometimes the music actually has a rest. Then you can take a deep breath.

Other times if you have to just slip a quick breath in there, you'll want to do what's called a catch breath, so it's just kind of a real fast breath, and it may not be real deep yet, but at least you'll make it to the end of the phrase when you can take another deep breath. 

Next you'll want to look at Expression for the song. So what type of song is this? Is this a lullaby that a mom is singing to her baby, so you want it to be soft and [00:11:00] gentle and very legato, smooth, not harsh or loud or strong to scare the baby. So think about what type of music it is. 

Maybe it is a very powerful patriotic song that you're singing with lots of fervor. And you're accenting certain phrases and words and that's a different style. So look at the style of the song, the words that are with it, the purpose of the song, and make sure that you are singing with the expression that matches that song. 

You'll want to look to see if the composer put certain things in there for you to do, such as dynamic markings. Does it say to sing piano? Does it say that you're going to crescendo? Does it say, that this phrase is, forte and this one that's echoing it is piano. So look at those dynamic markings and make sure you [00:12:00] follow it. 

You'll also want to look at the tempo markings. Does it tell you that you're supposed to sing it at a specific tempo, like quarter note equals 108. That means you'll want to look at a metronome. You can get a metronome app, you can buy a metronome and then set it to 108 and then you can hear how many 108 beats per second, I mean per minute, is and know how fast the composer wanted you to sing that song. And you may not be able to start out that fast, but eventually that will be your goal.   

A composer often will give some other expression markings in there like sing smoothly or sing vivaciously. Look for those markings and that will help you to know how you are supposed to sing that song as well.   

Alright, when you are singing, you'll want to have poise and confidence. Just like if you were [00:13:00] public speaking and sometimes it really does take practice. A lot of people are afraid to do public speaking and a lot of people are shy about singing in public and it takes practice. It takes a little bit of, "Okay, I'm going to step outside of my comfort zone and I'm going to do this. I'm going to try. And if I fail, that's okay, but I'm going to try." 

And that's what you want to encourage yourself and your kids to do. It may take a while before they are confident enough to sing a solo and maybe they'll never be confident enough to sing a solo, but at least singing with a group and that would be your goal is to not just hide your singing in your own home, but to get out and sing for other people as well.

There are certain types of songs that I would say are best for certain ages. When you are young, remember how I said to have a small [00:14:00] range. Always our goal is not to hurt your voice, because you actually can get to the point where you have damaged your voice, and then it could take time to heal. You could create vocal nodes, problems with your voice. And so we want to prevent that. Anytime you're feeling pain don't do that. Pain is telling you that's not a good thing to do with your voice. 

When you're warming up each day you want to start soft. You want to start in the middle of your range, not real high, not real low. Start in the middle and you want to do some sirens or some lip trilling like that up and down so that you're getting into it. Just like if you were exercising or starting to go for a run, maybe you would start walking first or you do some stretching first. Especially if you've just woken up in the morning. You don't want to push those muscles hard before [00:15:00] you've warmed up. Well, that's what you do with singing as well. You want to definitely warm up your voice. And if you are young and you don't have a wide range yet, stay in a middle of your voice range. Find songs that are not real high or real low. 

That's what a lot of the folk songs are that I recommend teaching for kids because they have a limited range. They're easy to sing. The intervals are not weird or tricky. There's usually not a lot of sharps or flats, notes that are outside of the key signature, so it's easier for kids to sing. Those are where I would start, with the typical folk songs. 

And, remember what I mentioned about boys whose voices are changing? Help them to just find some songs or just warming up in that range that they can still sing. So they're keeping their voice going but not stretching it until, they are [00:16:00] able to sing those other notes. Not doing anything that causes pain because they're growing. They're literally changing what's going on in here and how it looks. And we don't want to hurt their voices. 

Let me mention a little bit about taking voice lessons. I recommend taking like serious voice lessons, waiting until the voice has completely changed. For boys, that's usually in high school. But girls voices change too. And same thing, it's usually about high school that their voices will have changed.

I played piano from, piano lessons, from age seven to about 15. And then I switched to voice lessons and took voice lessons from then on, and, got my music ed degree with a vocal emphasis and then got a vocal pedagogy masters degree, so I didn't actually start serious voice lessons [00:17:00] until I was 15 or 16, and I was still successful in later years.

That was recommended to me by a friend of my mom's who was a music teacher. She was an elementary music teacher, and she said, just keep playing piano until you're older, then switch to voice lessons. And I feel like that was very wise advice and I'm glad that I followed it because I might have hurt my voice if I had started really serious voice lessons sooner. And hopefully most voice teachers wouldn't do that, but you never know with certain ones. So that would be a recommendation. 

If you're doing a singing course, make sure it is written for the age level that you have. If you're teaching singing to little children like preschool and elementary kids, make sure their songs are appropriate for their voices.

And, find a voice teacher that you can trust when they're in high school, someone who's [00:18:00] experienced, someone who knows how to take care of the voice and won't strain it to the point where it will cause damage. 

I think that I have talked everything I wanted to about how to teach singing in your home. If you have any questions about it, you can reach out to me and I can share different resources with you that might help you, but I want you to sing in your home.

I want you to enjoy singing and it has been a pleasure to talk to you today. Bye bye.

Find all links to resources mentioned in this episode here: https://musicinourhomeschool.com/singing-101-for-homeschoolers/