Music itself is fun and interesting but sometimes it gets boring most especially when it is not taught in the most effective way.

As a music teacher, you’ll have to spend a lot of time and effort in order to make your students get interested in learning music and at the same time think of ways on how you can do it.

Constant planning and updating of your lesson plan will help a lot in order for you to come up with the best ideas on how you can make your teaching more effective.

But before you can set up another plan, you have to first evaluate the results of your previous lesson plan. Identify those methods and techniques that you used where you have observed that your students become more interested in listening, participating and engaging in your music lessons.

You have also to identify those moments or parts of your music lessons where your students become less interested and have low participation. 

As a music teacher, you must be aware of what part of the lessons your students get more confused, don’t understand, feel a bit difficult and get more bored.

Knowing all these things can help you track your effectiveness as a music teacher and help you improve your teaching abilities.

Below, we identify some tips on how you can teach music to children in the most effective way.

1. Influence your student.
2. Give hands-on activities.
3. Give students different kinds of tasks.
4. Choose what your students like.
5. Make use of technology.
6. Let students collaborate.
7. Appreciate the skills and talents your students have.
8. Be creative in assigning tasks.
9. Make music more fun in games.
10. Let your students’ musical performances be seen.

1. Influence your student.

As a teacher, you have the obligation to be a role model to your students. You need to influence your students to act and behave like you.

To be an effective teacher, your students must be influenced by your values and behavior. They must be seen imitating you as a good role model to them.

To teach music effectively, you must influence your students with your attitude towards music.

You must show them how enthusiastic and eager you are to teach them music lessons.

You must let them see the excitement in your eyes, the energy in your actions and the happiness in your voice as you teach them music lessons every day.

In that way, your students can see how passionate you are in what you are doing and they will be influenced and inspired to the same because they have seen how much you love teaching music and how fun and interesting it is for you.

2. Let your students see and experience what they read.

Hands-on activities play a role to give life to the music theory lessons that you are teaching to your students.

Music theory lessons alone cannot make students understand the whole music lessons. Of course, they need to have a hands-on experience of the musical theory that they are learning.

So the best way is to make use of musical instruments while discussing the music lessons.

For example, you can get hold of musical instruments while discussing its parts and functions.

Also, you can play a musical instrument while discussing about rhythm, tempo, beat, notes, etc.

Or let your students be the one to play the musical instruments to explore the things they read in theory.

3. Give students different kinds of tasks.

One way to also eliminate the boring moment in your music class is to always give your students varying activities every day.

By doing this, you are breaking the ice within your students. This will make them more energetic and creative as they will explore and undergone different activities every day.

Having different tasks will make their minds always on the go as they will be challenged. When students’ minds are occupied, there is no room for laziness anymore.

So for example, on the first day of week, you group them and assign a music topic for reporting.

On the next day, you will let them draw musical instruments or anything that relates to your music lesson.

On the next following day, you will let them practice playing a musical instrument.

So it’s up to you on how you would fill the entire week with different kinds of task that you think would make your music lessons more engaging to your students.

4. Choose what your students like.

They say that most likely students will like a teacher who is always on their side.

Well, this is true of course. When students feel that you give them what they want and you got their back, they will appreciate you more and will also feel close to you.

So, you can ask your students what are the things they want to do in your music class for it to be more fun and enjoyable.

When students feel that they are being heard, they feel that they belong, they are needed and because of that they participate more.

For example, when discussing a lesson and you make use of playing a song, you can consult your students on what song they want to be played so they will enjoy more.

It’s not bad to give what your students want, at times when you feel they don’t want to be involved anymore, their opinion really matters.

5. Make use of technology.

For sure this one will be more fun for students because we already live in a world where technology already plays an important role in the life of most people.

So to involve technology in teaching music to your students will really help a lot in making your students understand more the lessons and become participative.

For example, you can use a cell phone, computer or laptop or any other form of technology in delivering your music lessons to the students.

You can let them learn how to play a certain musical instrument by watching YouTube. Also, you can make use of the computer to record and compose a song.

Well, there are really a lot of things that you and your students can do using technologies.

6. Let students collaborate.

It’s not effective if only a few students are willing to participate in your class. So you must make everyone in your class get interested and get involved in learning music lessons.

That is why you need to let them cooperate with each other.

You need to let them get close to every student in the class and talk and help each other.

One best way to do this is to group them or pair them. By doing this, when you assign a certain task or project, both of them need to share knowledge, skills and effort so they can have a passing grade.

When your students have a share of responsibility, it makes them think that the load is not that heavy anymore and they will feel easy anymore to do the task because they already have someone who can help them.

7. Appreciate the skills and talents your students have.

Most of the time, teachers forget to see, acknowledge and appreciate a student’s skills and talents.

Well, it should not be neglected by every teacher. You must learn to observe and know what your students are good at.

When you start acknowledging what your students can do, you can use it as a way so that your students will be more interested in your music lessons.

For example, if some of your students are good at drawing, you must assign tasks to them that involve drawing, like drawing a musical instrument or drawing something that represents music in their lives, etc.

Also, for example if one of your students is good at composing a song, then you would assign a task to him/her that involves composing a song.

When you start to make use of your students’ strength, you will feel that they will become more interested in engaging in your class because they are doing what they are good at.

8. Be creative in assigning tasks.

You just don’t assign tasks to you students. You have also to make sure that they will enjoy it.

You have to be creative. Being creative means moving a step forward from the usual way of things.

So for example, you will let them do a role playing using only the lyrics of a song that they will choose or you will assign to them. Challenging, right?

Another one, you can let them do a musical show by using their own compositions and by integrating different characters from movies. Isn’t it more fun?

9. Make music more fun in games.

Everyone loves to play games, so why not play games in your music class?

Be creative in all the games that you will play in music class. Make sure it would be very fun and at the same time all the lessons that you intend to teach to your students are incorporated in your game.

Everyone would be happy when studying would just be like playing, right?

You can search on the internet to have some ideas on the kinds of games you would want to do in your class or you can consult your students’ opinion also.

For example, you can play charades with a twist, like instead of guessing what is being act, students will guess what is being sang.

It is really more fun when games are part of your lesson plan!

10. Let your students’ musical performances be seen.

One thing that can also measure the effectiveness of your teaching is to let your students showcase what they’ve learned.

You have to organize recitals, concerts or other events that will showcase the learnings of your students.

You can also record a video of them performing and upload it to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok or any other social media so that many people can see and witness the performance of your students.

In this way, you can evaluate how much your students learned from you and then measure your effectiveness as a teacher to them.

Also, by doing this, you are helping your students gain more confidence and appreciate all their efforts in learning about music.