Teaching Young Singers to HARMONIZE!

Jantina Masters
Feb 20, 2025
2 min read

This week in one of my Group Singing Classes, I was met with a familiar challenge, teaching young singers to harmonize! I can remember distinctively during my classroom teaching years…lol…not so long ago – having to use “Rounds” to train young ears to hear and sing different parts at once.

In our lesson, I used a simple round to train my young voices to learn one melodic line, before teaching them to sing it simultaneously. We started by learning to sing the same melody together. We learned the lyrics and the rhythm. We then broke into three different groups and learned to come in at different times rhythmically. Helping them to know when exactly to come in proved to be a greater challenge than them actually singing at different times!

The students in my Group Singing Class were amazed at how this exercise helped them sing different parts at the same time! They learned key skills needed to begin hearing and singing different notes in harmony together. This is just one of many lessons I’ll teach to prepare them for harmonizing together. I love this YouTube video taken from an older, Classic episode of Sesame Street! This is the song I taught my students, and I’ve even shared a link on the Music for Music Teachers website of the sheet music by John Hilton in the key of C Major for this particular Round, “Come Follow.” Not to mention, this song is really fun to sing, and the melody when sung in layers one after the other is absolutely beautiful! I want to encourage other music teachers not to be intimidated when introducing your little ones to singing Rounds! Will you try this with your younger music students? Share your experience in the comments below!

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