“My children’s choir only meets for 30 minutes once a week. How do I get my choir to memorize the words to all of our songs in time for their performance?”

I can’t tell you how many times I have been asked this question. Memorization can be a tricky task for a children’s choir director, especially when rehearsal time is limited or rushed. We are always told that children’s brains are built for memorization, but sometimes we fail to see this come performance time. The fact is that children do memorize and remember so much information with ease when they are given the chance for consistent repetition over a bit of time. Some of my very best childhood memories involve singing entire songs from old musicals which my sister and I watched again and again over our summer breaks. That constant exposure over time really makes that information stick, but most of us do not have years to prepare for our choirs’ concerts and musicals.

Most directors would jump at the opportunity for more time with their children’s choirs, but the reality is that this busy culture of ours has allotted just enough time to dip our toes into a multitude of different activities, which is great for wide exposure but limits depth in any one activity. Every spring when sports and end of school activities take over, I would find myself in this time crunch weeks before our final spring concert, so I began to start rethinking how I could help my choir memorize more efficiently. I learned two things in the process: We tend to overestimate a child’s ability to memorize stacks of raw information in a short session, but we also underestimate a child’s ability to memorize conceptually from an understanding of connected information.

My first daughter actually gave me the insight to this different approach. She was about 3 years old and had been singing her ABC song with the wonderful nonsense word “eleminopy” right in the middle of the alphabet. She also had been learning what the letters look like and their proper order from a place mat I had gotten her. It was the first real scholastic eureka moment I witnessed in one of my children, and I was so proud! She had taken her little finger to the place mat to point to the letters as she sang, and she realized “eleminopy” was actually 5 letters and not a funny word stuck in the middle of all the other letters. From that point on, she knew the context and sang the correct letters from then on. As a result, I had a eureka moment of my own: Understanding and context play a huge role in a child’s memorization. My sweet daughter locked that new bit of information away and has never looked back. What had taken her a couple of years to learn was quickly corrected, assimilated, and stored for use for the rest of her life. Of course, consistent repetition will always be a way to really cement details, but the understanding of the language and message help smooth the process and provide the glue to stick all the details together in a meaningful and lasting way.

I decided to give this new way of tackling memorization a go with my children’s choir that spring, and I was so pleased with the outcome. I began spending less time drilling the words of the songs and more time discussing the meaning of the lyrics and the way they fit together. It is much easier to remember a complete thought than a string of words. A complete thought works with your mind to make associations and connections that pull the words together in a logical order. Most young children do not do this initially on their own, which is why you can hear them singing hilariously cute mispronounced or made up words, such as “eleminopy,” as though they belong in the song. Once my daughter sang her ABCs with a visual guide, she put the letters in context and gained understanding of what she was singing. If we take a minute or two every rehearsal to explain and review the lyrics as complete thoughts and why they are important to sing, our children will memorize more efficiently over the course of the precious few weeks of rehearsal time because they will connect the words as parts of the whole instead of isolated chunks.

I recently had the privilege of directing a children’s choir for a Good Friday service. They were to sing four verses of “Man of Sorrows,” and we had only three rehearsals to commit the entire song to memory. They were singing with live accompaniment, and most of the children were 8 years old or younger. We spent almost the entire first rehearsal just talking about the meaning of each verse before speaking through the lyrics with the correct emphases and inflections. Then we sang the words in the same way that we spoke them. The second rehearsal was much of the same but as a review. By the third rehearsal, those who could read were not referencing their sheet music anymore, and the little ones were keeping up with them very well. We had the luxury of spending that third rehearsal refining the harmony part and enjoying the music rather than drilling words. When they sang for the service, they were singing with conviction from an understanding of the lyrics. Have you ever watched a child singing from a worshipful heart, proclaiming the truths they have stored away? I am sure you have witnessed this from time to time, and it is a truly beautiful sight. In fact, I would assert that most of us children’s choir directors signed up for the job with this very goal in mind.

The process for memorization is pretty simple. Explain and discuss your chosen song with your choir. I like to start with the general idea of the whole song before discussing the meaning of the individual verses and chorus. Ask questions about the meaning. The more you can engage your choir in this process, the more they will interact with the lyrics themselves. Once they understand the idea of the song, you can have them repeat after you with your designated inflections. I would not jump directly to singing quite yet because spoken lyrics will add the next layer of connection to help children see the full thought before you add the melodic component. After they have put the right emphases in the spoken lyrics, the next step is to pair it with the melody. Now you can use that old, faithful tool of consistent repetition, but I am fairly certain the groundwork you have already laid will make that repetition more fruitful and even more enjoyable. Children love repeating something they enjoy, so if you help them to enjoy your chosen song through the understanding of it, they will want to repeat it as many times as your energy allows.

So are you ready to give this a go? You might already be using a similar process in your choir, and I would love to hear about it. Please share any extra helpful comments below. Together we all make up a wealth of knowledge and experience, and we can all learn from each other.

Working with a children’s choir is one of the most rewarding activities I have ever experienced. The invitation you extend to the children to sing with you creates a long-term connection with them, and you are pouring into them in a way that will affect them for the rest of their lives. Thank you for all you do to support these children in this way. As adults, these children will be grateful for all of your effort, and they will always remember that you took the time to sing with them.