Our Music curriculum is designed to cover all of the knowledge and understanding as set out in the National Curriculum. Our curriculum is designed to follow a sequence that builds upon and revisit previous learning. To ensure that children develop a secure knowledge, it is organised into a cyclical and progressive model that provides breadth and balance, ensuring the development of musical concepts, knowledge and skills alongside a love for music.
We provide purposeful opportunities for all children to create, play, perform and enjoy music, to develop the skills, to appreciate a wide variety of musical forms, and to begin to make judgements about the quality of music.
Children perform, listen to, review and evaluate music across a range of historical periods, genres, styles and traditions, including the works of the great composers and musicians. Children learn to sing and to use their voices, to create and compose music on their own and with others, have the opportunity to learn a musical instrument and use technology appropriately. They explore how music is created, produced and communicated with increased complexity over time, including through the interrelated dimensions: pitch, duration, dynamics, tempo, timbre, texture, structure and appropriate musical notations.
Core Elements of Music Teaching
- Engaging and inspiring lessons that promote critical thinking and curiosity.
- Retrieval of previous learning and explicit links through concepts that connect new learning with what the children already know.
- Carefully chosen resources and models of music within lessons.
- A focus on ambitious vocabulary used in context.
- Opportunities for extended ‘deliberate practice’ to build practical experience to evaluate from.
- Enriching learning experiences through, trips, workshops, visitors.
- Carefully chosen and planned lessons and activities that are scaffold and adapted to ensure all children meet the intent of the Music curriculum.
Curriculum
Our EYFS follows the Early Years Foundation Stage framework. Through Expressive Arts, children are taught to sing songs, make music and dance. Children are given opportunities to experiment with ways of changing sound and develop an understanding of pulse, rhythm and pitch. They are also encouraged to use everyday objects to make music and create sound and to experiment with sound using objects made from different materials such as wood, metal and plastic.
Music at KS1 is divided into 3 strands. Through singing, children are taught about pitch, range, response to visual directions, tempo and dynamics. Through composing and improvising, children are taught about rhythmic and pitch pattern, how musical notation represents sounds and how to create and improvise music. Through musicianship and performing, children learn pulse and beat linked to tempo. Children are taught rhythm and introduced to dot notation in order to recognise and match notes on a simple instrument.
Music at KS2 builds on learning in KS1 and is divided into 5 strands. Through singing, children are taught to sing in rounds, sing in unison, sing different time signatures and perform songs. Through improvising, children are taught to structure their musical ideas, refine the types of sounds made (staccato/legato), create music with a beginning/middle/end, make compositional decisions on their improvisations, incorporate dynamics and improvise in collaboration with other. Through composing, children are taught to compose song accompaniments, combine known rhythmic notation to create rising and falling phrases, composing music to a specific mood or desire effect, use minor and major chords, explore more advanced features of notation and time signatures by composing melodies enhanced with rhythmic or chord accompaniment. Through instrumental performance, children are taught to play and perform using tuned percussion or melodic instrument, play melodies following staff notation, develop the skill of playing by ear and engage with other through ensemble playing or singing. Through reading notation: children are taught to read music, follow rhythmic scores, read and perform pitch notation within an octave understand getting slower and faster and dynamic contrasts and read and play from notation a four-bar phrase.
Cultural Capital
Children are offered a wide range of enriching and engaging experiences which are designed to develop their knowledge and understanding of the world around them and the concepts taught within Music. Enrichment opportunities are a secure enhancement to core provision through choir, one to one music tuition and engagement in a wide variety of concert and performance opportunities.
Accessibility for all children
Our expectation is that the majority of children will move through the programmes of study at broadly the same pace through supporting children with additional inputs, interventions, peer support and resources.
The ambitious and inclusive nature of the curriculum allows a range of access points that ensure all children, including those with special educational needs, succeed, regardless of their circumstances, with high expectations set for everyone.
For more information on our approach to teaching Music, please look at our coffee morning timetable for the next available session or make an appointment in the school office to speak with our Music teacher.
Music Gallery
