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Music

The purpose of our music curriculum is to help children feel that they are musical and to develop a love of music. Our focus is on developing the skills, knowledge and understanding for pupils to become confident performers, composers, and listeners. Our curriculum allows children to hear music from all around the world and across generations, teaching children to respect music from all traditions and communities. We are following Kapow’s music scheme with additional instrumental lessons in KS2. Performance opportunities occur for the whole school once a year in a production shown to parents and the wider community. 


Our four key threads are our vision and weave through everything we do at North Scarle Primary School:


Our inclusive approach allows all children to ask questions and have opportunities to learn the basics of playing an instrument. We adapt our teaching to allow all children to access music provision.   


We want our pupils to be inspired by all styles and genres of music, have a passion for music, engaging with past, present and future music artists and technology. We hope our children are excited to learn and actively engage with hands-on experiences. 


Enrichment opportunities weaved through the curriculum enhance our pupils’ abilities to make connections with the musical world around them. 
Examples are – 

  • Young Voices Programme
  • Choir 
  • A yearly trip to the theatre 
  • Opportunity to access private music tuition through the Lincolnshire Music Service
  • A yearly whole school production
  • Carefully selected musical genres and artists are introduced on a weekly basis through our assemblies. 
  • Opportunities to sing to the wider community

We have adapted a cohesively planned music curriculum to be aspirational so that all pupils can achieve success.  

Implementation


Curriculum design:  We follow Kapow’s Primary Music Scheme. This ensures a holistic approach to music, the individual strands – performing, listening, composing, the history of music and the inter – related dimensions of music are woven together to create engaging and enriching learning experiences. Music is taught in each class (EYFS/Y1 – Y2/Y3 and Y4/Y5/Y6) on a weekly basis. We have designed the long-term overview to allow content to come first for the younger year group in the class. We then move onto the older year groups later in the year when children will have gained more knowledge and understanding. In Class 3, the children start each year with two instrumental units. This gives them an opportunity to learn how to play a tuned instrument. 


Active learning: We employ a variety of engaging and interactive teaching strategies. Each five – lesson unit combines the strands above within a cross – curricular topic designed to capture pupils’ imagination and encourage them to explore music enthusiastically. They will be taught how to sing fluently, and expressively, and play tuned and untuned instruments accurately with control. They will learn to recognise and name the interrelated dimensions of music – pitch, duration, tempo, timbre, structure, texture and dynamics – and use these expressively in their own improvisations and compositions. 


Cross-curricular activities: music is taught as a stand - alone lesson, but where possible, music is incorporated into other subjects and the wider curriculum. For example, in history we learn about music over the years; in science we learn about sound/human body; and in English, we link singing fluency with reading fluency and performance of texts. Our daily assemblies incorporate a new musician every week. Music by the same artist/composer is played for the duration of the week and the children are given information about them and their music.  Having such a range of music gives children opportunities to hear different genres of music both past and present on a weekly basis. 


Real world contexts: We look at music from all over the world, different cultures and the history of music. In our music scheme, there are opportunities to watch music being performed. 


Practical experiences: Opportunities to engage in Kapow’s instrumental scheme lessons from Year 4 are planned into our music cycles each year (as recommended in the Model music curriculum). When other musical experiences in the local area arise, we endeavour to take the children to be involved in these experiences.  


Impact
By the time our Year 6 children leave for secondary school, we intend for them to have:
•    The ability to play and perform in solo and ensemble contexts, using their voices and playing musical instruments with increasing accuracy, fluency, control and expression.
•    The knowledge and skills to improvise and compose music for a range of purposes using the inter-related dimensions of music.
•    Skills to listen with attention to detail and recall sounds with increasing aural memory.
•    Understanding of staff and other musical notations.
•     Appreciation and understanding of a wide range of high-quality live and recorded music drawn from different traditions and from great composers and musicians.
•    An understanding of the history of music.