Whenever someone talks about methods in teaching music, they only know the mainstream or the most common figures, like Kodaly, Orff, Suzuki, etc. What they didn’t know is there are more methods out there that are not commonly used but rather useful and effective, most especially when teaching young learners from grade school. The method that was going to be discussed here is what they call the “Ward Method” and how this particular way of teaching will be perceived as something recommended for teaching music inside the classroom.

            The Ward method is a progressive music instruction for teaching elementary student. This was an incorporation of different philosophies and methods that involves musical aesthetics. One might say that this might be the easiest way for the kids to learn since it only makes use of numbers to represent notes and intervals, and of dots to represent duration of a particular note. Aside from that, the good thing about this method is that Ward greatly emphasized singing as the foundation of musical instruction and should not be taught but should only guide the kids to find their own singing voice instead of feeding it into them.

            Notably, ear training is also included in this method, just like any other, to sharpen the ability of the students when imagining notes not in terms of absolute pitch but its position relative to other notes. Since Ward believes that learning music relies on own experience through movements and singing, just like Kodaly, she also made use of melodic gestures to represent the pitch of a particular tone to enhance musical memory.

            Lastly, being able to master these elements, improvisation is somewhat the output if one combines all that has been learned so far. It develops musical independence.

            These elements are introduced in succession to balance the sense of importance to each aspect and the difficulty of the material only progresses as the lesson went on. One can conclude that the Ward method may be used to teach music in the high school or secondary level. It’s progressive and also, it treats every aspect of music fairly. Sadly, some failed to do so because they are only concentrated on producing students that can read notes. By using the Ward method, children develop musical aesthetics as they go on and that’s mainly the focus of this music instruction.

By: Ms. Audrey Fatima C. Francisco | Teacher I | Bataan National High School | Balanga City, Bataan