Changing voices and other singing problems

Wednesday my plan was to have my fifth graders quickly sing through most of the songs for their show and then get in some recorder time. The classes chose (with their behavior) not to play recorders, and the singing had some issues, some of which I didn't know how to solve.

I have a few students whose voices seem to be changing and are singing down the octave. I try to encourage them to continue to sing higher, but one boy shook his head at me and I don't want to push him too hard if he just can't get those out right now. I need to do some more research about what I can expect from them (I guess I didn't expect so many changing voices in fourth and fifth grades). I also need to demonstrate singing myself more. I have them sing too much with the CD and some of those go back and fourth between low male voices and higher childrens' voices. Plus a lot of my students think the children singing are women...I've been trying to address that with them.

I've also had boys singing up the octave. Someone told me that can be common with autistic children, but these boys aren't. One might have been doing it to be funny, and the other one just seems to be having trouble matching pitch.

And then I had the girl too busy making flirty faces over her shoulder to bother trying. I came down pretty hard on her and felt bad afterward, but 11 years old is way too early to be throwing away your ability to learn on a boy. She had the flirty face pretty well down, too. I think that annoyed me as well.

I've been thinking about taking voice lessons over the summer (I did all my college work assuming I'd teach instrumental music) but I should probably also do reading on childrens' singing voices. Not that that will fix my last problem.