My school is doing Annie in the spring and I really want to learn how to sing so I can be cast, but can not afford voice lessons! HELP!!!
I am doing basically what you want to do. What I did was look up certain aspects of singing on my own (online). There are a lot of different topics on wikiHow.com.
http://www.wikihow.com/Sing
You can start with the above link. There are a lot of other topics at the bottom of this page, like how to breathe properly to protect your voice, singing with vibrato, extending your vocal range, etc. If you have other questions, you can search things in google or other search engines.
The thing is that you need to practice a lot. You obviously want to sing, and you probably listen to a lot of music. I suggest singing along to music in a similar range as your own, though you may have to practice with the music down a lot so that you can hear your tone above all else. You also have to be able to distinguish when your voice may not be perfectly in tune and be able to train your voice to sing the notes in tune (which is done simply by repeating the same passage until you can regularly sing that passage in tune).
You may want to get a simple keyboard that you can practice scales with. Scales will help you find your vocal range, warm up (which is very important so that you don’t damage your voice), and help you increase your vocal range and strengthen your tone.
I’ve never been in choir, and I don’t COMPLETELY encourage that since the other kids around you may not sing in tune, and it might train your ear to accept the sound of out of tune notes, but I wouldn’t say that the choir would do you wrong, either…It’s all up to your level of motivation, really. If you can make the time to work on these things on your own, I don’t see why being in choir would be necessary, but it does give you more time to practice.
I hope this helps! Just remember that if you have questions, they can be found through search engines.