Reading the shape
Stage 1's steps-and-skips taught you to see whether a line moves by step or by skip. Fluent
reading takes that further: you read the whole contour — the up-and-down shape of the
line — as one thing, and the exact notes fall into place inside it.
Step, skip, leap — on the page
The staff makes the distance visible:
- Step (a 2nd) — line to the next space, or space to the next line. The note changes colour: line → space. Adjacent fingers, or the neighbouring note.
- Skip (a 3rd) — line to the next line, or space to the next space. The note stays the same colour: line → line. A finger's gap, or across a string.
- Leap (a 4th, 5th, 6th, octave) — a bigger jump; count the lines-and-spaces crossed. A string crossing, and/or a finger jump. You recognise these by how far the notehead moves, not by naming both notes.
A string on the page
Picture the melody as a piece of string laid on the staff, and follow it with your eye — up, over, down, along. You're tracking the line, not stopping at each bead. Where it climbs smoothly, that's a scale. Where it zig-zags in even jumps, that's a broken chord. Where it darts up and comes back, that's a turn or a neighbour figure. The next lesson names those shapes.
Try it
Try
Take a first-position tune. Before playing, run your finger along the melody line on the page and say the contour out loud — "up a bit, big jump up, back down slowly, step step step, home." Don't name a single note. Then play it. Your hand will have a head start, because it knows the shape it's about to make.
The usual mistake
Reading the interval between every pair of notes as a separate calculation — "up a 2nd… up a 2nd… up a 2nd…" — which is barely faster than naming notes. The point is to see the whole run as "a scale, up" in one glance. Steps and skips are how you check an unclear spot, not how you read the easy parts.