You can teach younger children to sing, you just have to do it correctly. A Voice Teacher needs to understand the young voice in order to teach voice lessons.
This is why you can start teaching voice students young.
In the video young Bella, age 6 sings How Great Thou Art in front her largest audience and this is a really good example of what a 6 year old voice student should sound like. As singing becomes more popular our voice students are requesting to start younger and younger. Bella is the clear talent and below is an outline of how we’re doing our best to develop it.
Do It The Right Way
Bella’s Voice Teacher is Ms Sally Rose Bates. Sally knows what’s important for young students but more important is what Sally believes every voice teacher should know about teaching younger vocal students. Here’s a top 5, best practices for young singers list from Sally:
1. Allow Young Voice Student to sound like a child. Do not have them emulate an adult sound or an idol of theirs.
2. Allow their voices to change gradually over time while their bodies or vocal mechanism is still growing. Young Singers lungs are still not full size so that won’t be able to sing as long phrases yet.
3. Help them to learn the basics of a low/downward and relaxed inhalation breath for singing. This is the foundation of learning to sing correctly. Then teach them to sing on a consistently flowing airstream. Lip trills are great for this!
4. Have them sing in a child’s range and age appropriate songs.
5. Don’t forget to have fun.
Breathing Pays Dividends
Looking at the performance video you know Bella really is showing off her “Nerves Of Steel. All the breathing work is really paying off. Breathing is your foundation and is probably the most important technique we teach young voice students. We’re also proud of Bella’s diction, you can easily understand what she is singing and that isn’t easy.
Piano and Voice, A Final Note
In addition to her voice work Bella also learns to play Piano. At her age it’s really important to develop a musician and she as a great attitude about it. It’s also a requirement, at least for us at LIYH to teach piano when we teach voice for this age group.