Week 4 — Drill Plan · Major on Solfège

Course: MUS 155 Aural Skills I · Kenosis College
Instructor: Professor Hemsworth
Unit: Learning Unit 4 of 15 (Week 4) · two sessions per week
Objectives: SLO 1 · SLO 2 · SLO 3
Sessions: session 1 · session 2 (Skills Check 4 in the last quarter hour of session 2)

Instructor-facing. This file is excluded from the student cartridge. Every stimulus named below is notated, with its performance script, in _keys/KEY-stimulus-sheet-week-04.md — nothing musical is spelled out here.

Named in Music Theory I: the major scale and its W/H pattern, all fifteen major keys, key signatures, the circle of fifths, scale degrees ^1–^7, movable-do solfège — the morning the syllable system arrives.

First time teaching this

The point of the LU: this is the handover week. For three weeks the class has sung on "loo" while the theory course built the staff, the beat, and the divided beat; this morning it named the major scale and movable do. An hour later every sound they already own gets its syllable — and three firsts happen in one week: first full solfège singing, first true sight-singing, first melodic dictation. Keys this week are the four the theory class just spelled: G, F, D, and C major.

The one thing that must land: do travels. The syllables are a map of distances from home, not new note names — sing the same ladder from four different homes on day one so nobody files do as "another word for C." The second thing: the dictation protocol. The first melodic dictation must feel like a ritual they already know (it extends Unit 2's hear–tap–count–write to pitch), not a test sprung on them.

The most common way it goes wrong: the syllables become the content. Solfège is scaffolding — the rubric inversion says a right pitch on a wrong syllable barely costs, and a right syllable on a wrong pitch fails. Say that out loud session 1. Guard rails: the do–mi–sol figure is only ever "the do–mi–sol shape" (its name arrives in Unit 9 — never "chord," never "triad"); and degree numbers are distances from do, not finger numbers.

The do ritual

Identical ritual, all fifteen units (defined in full in Unit 1's B, ## The do ritual): play I–IV–V–I in the day's key, sing "do," the class sings the shape back. This week the ritual gets its upgrade: the response is sung as do–mi–sol–mi–do on syllables — same shape they have sung since Unit 1, new words. Say so, minute one: "You've sung this answer on 'loo' for three weeks. As of this morning it has names. Same door, same shape — now say what you sing."

Drill sequence

Session 1 — stimuli by keys-sheet name; tempi, repetitions, and the words to say.

Session 2 — new keys, the pickup, sixteenths at speed, then the check.

When they miss it

Per drill: what the miss sounds like, and the immediate corrective — a specific next sound, never a re-explanation.

Escalation path

If a drill fails room-wide, drop one rung: the scale ladder falls back to its first five notes (do up to sol and back); orientation falls back to targets 1–3–5 only; sight-singing falls back to SS1 or to the scale itself sung from the page; dictation falls back to D0 (the floor card) or to rhythm-only notation with pitch added on an extra hearing. Re-establish tonic the same way every time: stop, run the do ritual once, resume. Abandon criterion: a segment still failing after two escalated attempts gets banked — "your ears will own this by next week; moving on" — and logged. The named pick-up hook: every Unit 4 drill returns inside Unit 5, where this exact material flips to minor — the scale ladder returns as three-forms singing, the do–mi–sol shape returns with its middle lowered, orientation and dictation re-run in parallel keys. A banked Unit 4 drill re-enters there at floor difficulty; nothing is lost.

Tempo table

Rotation note (P states it to students): the solo-hearing rotation continues inside the orientation and sight-singing segments — 6 to 8 students heard individually per session means every voice is heard solo roughly every two and a half weeks at a full section of 36; in a small room, everyone, every session. Keep the ledger current: the Unit 7 check assumes the rotation has touched everyone twice.