Music Street. It’s a great way to engage students when you teach new solfege notes and help them remember the syllable name as they are introduced to different notes. But what do you include in a music street story if you’ve not been given a story to share with your students? Mt. Solfege is a great story to use with your students that will engage and expand with them as they grow.
When I first started teaching, I didn’t have a Music Street story and when I started looking at Kodaly style teaching, I came across the idea online. I really wanted to include one in my lessons on solfege but I was never blessed to find any sort of transcript or breakdown so I made one up with my students.
Over the course of YEARS I slowly created one as my students went through the solfege syllables to create a cohesive story. Here’s some of the things I made sure to include:
- Octave related notes are also related – for example, La and Low La are grandma and grand daughter.
- Parts of the town are named for musical terms: the ledgers, the sharp mountain range, the flat wetlands.
- Re has a last name, “Pentatonic”.
- Visuals between Mi & Fa and Ti and Do’ are represented with shorter steps to represent the half steps.
- References to “major” and “leading tone”.
- The “grandest hills around” refers to the grand staff.
Sounds great? Want to use it? Hear the Story on YouTube here:
Resources
Looking to adapt it a bit but just want some basic houses?
So that’s Mt. Solfege. This is one of the things I’m really proud of in the work I’ve put together. I hope you love this as much as my students and I do!
