Yes, there is something you can do, but maybe not to beneift you THIS year. Sight reading is either a natural talent or a learned process. To learn it you need to practice it.
Get a bunch of music and practice sightreading by playing the music only as fast as you can without making a mistake. Go as slow as you have to. It doesn't matter what instrument it is for. Also, you might try reading music backwards (new music and music you have played before). The key to sight reading is NOT stopping - even if you make a mistake keep going. You should also practice this way. Play the section you are going to work on straight through, then go back and work on the small parts you made mistakes on.
Most sightreading mistakes occur :
a) when you miss a note you start thinking about it and start missing more notes.
b) going from the end of a line to the begining of a new line. Most people read by lines, thry to be looking at the begining of the net line before you finish the line you are on.
c)too fast. Many times you look at the first two measures and then find out you're going too fast as all of a sudden you see tons of 16th notes. Look at the key signature, and the fastest notes and base your tempo on how fast you are going to be able to play those.
Depending when in December the try outs are you might some decent progress.
Remember the reason they have sight reading on the test is that they want people who are going to learn difficult music quickly. The better you sight read the more challenging and advanced music they can play.
If you can play the piece at a medium tempo accurately, they will know you only have to go through it a couple time smore to speed it up. So look for those points I mentioned earlier. Also, look for patterns. You say you know your scales well. When you practice sight reading look for those scales. An example would be you see the piece is in Ab Major. You look ahead and see a series of three runs. The first run starts on Ab, the second run starts on Eb, and the third run starts on Bb. Are all of these runs in the key of Ab but just starting on a different note, or are there accidentals and these runs are each in their own key actually modulating the piece?
Try to find groupings of three. Composers love the number three.
Learn slowly, it will make you more accurate sooner as opposed to larning too quickly which usually makes us sort of good.
That's three weeks to learn a little bit of sight reading skills. Remember to do it slowly, you might eb surprised how much you can learn in three weeks. If you can spend 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes in the evening it would do wonders for you.
