1. Always have new song lyrics in Braille for your student to refer to. Transcribing your song lyrics in Braille gives your student another chance to read! Remember: Blind students may not always have the same opportunities to see sight words in their environment or have readily available Braille reading materials as their sighted peers. Use every opportunity to develop Braille reading and literacy skills. Your student should also know the Braille music code as they progress through their music education.
2. Use a Braille binder to store lesson materials for future reference. Be sure to have this folder marked with Braille for easy identification.
3. Record short musical passages, song lyrics, and individual lines in school plays and send them home with your child for reference to learn their specific part. Make sure you have all song lyrics and playback lines transcribed in Braille for easy reference.
4. Use Braille labeling to help your student locate specific notes on the piano, xylophone, recorder, etc. Braille markings will allow easy identification of musical notes. The hands-on exploration of the piano, xylophone, or recorder will give your student information about musical notes that they may not understand with just an auditory presentation. Ex: musical notes move up and down through the scale and musical notes look different depending on where they appear on the scale and whether they appear as whole notes, half notes, etc.
5. Provide creative solutions for hands-on tactile demonstrations of: staff, treble and bass clefs, time signatures, and musical notes, such as using raised lined music paper for demonstrations. Tactile demonstrations will greatly support auditory information.
6. Use tactile markers on your raised line music paper to demonstrate treble and bass clefs, time signatures, and musical notes. Tactile markers are commercially available in different sizes and textures.
7. Support your student’s understanding of time signatures by modeling each signature using a conductor’s baton for demonstrations. A hands-on approach will provide your blind or visually impaired student with tactile and kinesthetic motion/motion of the time signature. This approach will help your student understand downbeats, time signatures, and the rhythm/beat of music. Follow up with a tactile time signature chart that can be easily done with tactile markers or dry glue.
8. Pair sighted students with blind/visually impaired students to duplicate the teacher’s gestures during songs. Blind students cannot see the gestures of the teacher’s songs that are frequently used in the music class of primary education.
9. Provide your student with hands-on exploration/demonstration of at least one instrument from each family of musical instruments, such as: woodwinds, brass, percussion, and strings.
10. Ask your student to make their own musical instrument, such as a basic drum or maracas, to take home to practice/explore rhythms.
11. Provide your student with homemade Braille music paper and tactile markers so they can compose their own simple music notations. Be sure to share these musical creations with the class.
12. Demonstrate rhythms using favorite poems that correlate to specific time signatures.