Tips on Modifications for Learning Disabled Students

Choir conductors around the country are facing the challenge of teaching singers while trying to accommodate their learning disabilities. Sometimes learning disabilities can make it difficult for students to reach their full singing potential. Even the most talented singers may feel discouraged reading music if they are easily distracted or find it difficult to track and decode music. Using my experiences with my own children and the students of my classroom, both typical and with needs, I have formulated a list of accommodations to help support the students in your choir.

IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) is a “federal law that requires all public schools to provide services to students with disabilities to meet their unique educational needs.” Often teachers “mean well” but are not entirely sure how to best support students with learning disabilities and fall short of creating appropriate accommodations for these students. The strategies listed below may help to make reading octavos easier for your exceptional singer.

Accommodations

Know Your Student: Students will most likely share their strengths and weaknesses with you. Inquiring about a student’s needs can often be the best way to understand how they learn and what is necessary for their success. Beyond checking whether a child has an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) or a Section 504 Accommodation Plan (504) and perusing such documents, I have found that talking to the child and/or parent is highly beneficial. This dialogue can provide meaningful insight into your singer’s learning style, and a useful plan can be devised together. Contacting the student and/or parent will also align teachers with the student and family.

Structured Rehearsal: Every chorister will feel at ease in a rehearsal that is structured with a repetitive process. This doesn’t mean that each choir rehearsal is exactly the same, but rather that students know what to expect from the procedure. For instance, in my rehearsals, students can expect a two-minute meditation and stretch to begin rehearsal. It is followed by breathing exercises, then rhythmic and tonal warmups. The warm-ups are usually somewhat related to the pieces we are working on. Lastly, students can expect some sort of canon or short song to apply warm-ups, and then scores will be rehearsed.

Enlarging Print: Sometimes, making the music bigger is all you need to do to help the child track notes easily. This can be an easy fix, and it takes very little time to enlarge the score.

Highlighting Parts: It may be helpful for students to have their particular voice part in the octavo highlighted to keep their eyes tracking their own part and not accidentally floating to another line of music. Students are often overwhelmed with all the notes and various lines of music, so going through and highlighting their own part can make tracking easier. The notes, lyrics, or both can be highlighted to best help the student. It is also possible to highlight each voice part in a different color so that the singer can easily remember the color of each. For additional support, it may be beneficial for the student to use their finger to track the highlighted line.

Peekaboo Sheet: Take a blank piece of card stock and cut a narrow rectangle, the length of one line of music from the score. Singers can put the cardstock over the octavo, only revealing the current line to be sung. This is a valuable idea for those who still would like access to the full score of music to check for how the music aligns with other parts yet find it helpful to read just one line at a time.

Cutting and Pasting: Although this takes a little bit of extra time, cutting and pasting just their line of music onto a clean sheet of paper can help a student track with success. The downside of this accommodation is that the student will not have access to understanding how their parts and entrances fit with instruments and other voicings, so this accommodation is only recommended if the above suggestions are not successful. As mentioned before, you must know your student.

Font Friendly: Sometimes, the least restrictive environment for a student to achieve success just happens to be a “lyrics-only” form of reading, and that is okay. If you have to write lyrics for a student, you may want to consider a “dyslexic-friendlier” font, such as Arial or Comic Sans, or you can purchase a font that is made specifically for people with dyslexia. This font type can make reading easier for all students, not just those with dyslexia.

Recordings: It is helpful for students to have access to recorded music. Recordings could be of individual parts and of the entire piece as a whole, although it can be valuable to provide both. Students can practice listening and singing at home along with the modified music ideas suggested above.

Special Software: If your school is well funded, there is software available to help students better read notes using color codes and shapes. Although using a software program that helps color code each individual note for the student may be useful, plugging in the notes into the system may be considered cumbersome.

Ask for Help: Often, there are individuals highly trained merely footsteps away, and although they may not understand the depth and scope of your job, they can still provide helpful insight on a specific student or how to best accommodate all around.

Quite often, teachers are well-intentioned yet not always equipped to support students with learning disabilities; however, it is our responsibility to work with all available resources to come up with a plan to best support each exceptional child. When unsure of how to support a student, it is important to remember to do your research, ask questions, and request help. There are trained people near you who have an abundance of knowledge of exceptional students and can easily point you in the right direction. When in doubt, be curious, ask questions, and always do what’s best for the child.