The children stand and sing the tune straight through again, beating
time as they do so.

3. Individual children then stand and sing the tune by themselves,
beating time. In this way the child gets to know the sound of its own
voice, and the teacher can correct any individual faults of intonation,
voice production, &c. Some children will always have an inclination to
shout when they sing with others, partly through excitement and partly
because they cannot hear their own voices in any other way. If this be
permitted the quality of tone will rapidly degenerate, and the effect of
the whole class work will suffer.

Nothing is more delightful than to hear young children sing quietly, and
without in any way forcing their voices.

CHAPTER VIII

THE TEACHING OF DICTATION

So long as the work done in ear-training is in the very elementary
stages the best form of dictation will be:

1. Ear tests, consisting of two to three notes at a time, which should
be written in staff notation as soon as possible.

2. Monotone time tests, which should be quite short, as the constant
repetition of the same note in pitch is irritating to the more sensitive
ears in a class. This point is sometimes overlooked, with the result
that only the less musical children get any real benefit from the tests.

By the time that children can sing at sight in the key of D major they
will be ready to take down from dictation short melodic phrases in time
and tune. A useful plan is for the phrase to be played over three times,
the children listening carefully and beating time. They should then sing
the phrase once through to _lah_, and write it down.

This method of dictation is more satisfactory than that of dictating a
bar at a time, as it draws attention to musical phrases as a whole.
Later on it will be found possible to dictate in the same way longer and
longer phrases. Incidentally the memory is being trained as well as the
ear.

The class should be accustomed to write phrases which do not
necessarily begin on the first beat of the bar. The handwriting, exact
position of accidentals, &c., should be carefully watched. With young
children it is well to use manuscript books which have the lines ruled
very widely apart--a little child's hand soon gets cramped if it is made
to write in an ordinary manuscript book.

When a class can take down simple melodies correctly it is time to begin
two-part work. As a preliminary, get a child to play