At Townville Infant and Nursery School, we aspire to offer the best possible early education for all our children in a happy, safe, inclusive environment.
Through our Music Curriculum we aim to ensure our Key Stage 1 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
- learn to sing and to use their voices
- create and compose music on their own and with others
- have the opportunity to learn a musical instrument
- use their musical skills, knowledge, and experiences to involve themselves in music, in a variety of different contexts.
- understand and explore how music is created, produced and communicated, including through the interrelated dimensions: pitch, duration, dynamics, tempo, timbre, texture, structure and appropriate musical notations
- develop a curiosity and love for music
- understand the value and importance of music in the wider community
This builds upon the children’s prior knowledge gained through the foundation stage for Music where children:
- explore, talk about, move and listen carefully to a range of rhyme and songs, focusing on how they sound
- learn rhymes, poems and songs and perform these both independently and as a group, beginning to move in time to the music
- explore and use music to express their ideas and feelings
- create collaboratively, sharing ideas, resources and skills
- explore and engage in music making
As creative and investigative learners’ children in EYFS are exposed to a range of expressive arts and given opportunity to listen, move, create and engage in music making and dance both independently and in groups. They learn and are taught how to express their ideas and feelings creatively through the medium of music and develop a repertoire of songs, rhymes, poems and stories.
In KS1, Music is taught as a discrete subject and is year group specific. We follow the Charanga Musical School Scheme which provides teachers with week-by-week lesson support for each year group. The scheme supports all the requirements of the National Curriculum. In line with the curriculum for music and guidance from Ofsted, this Scheme moves away from the previous levels and learning objective/outcome concepts to an integrated, practical, exploratory and child-led approach to musical learning. Charanga Musical School Units of Work enable children to understand musical concepts through a spiral, repetition-based approach to learning to enable a more secure, deeper learning and mastery of musical. As topics are revisited, the spiral curriculum enables the children to know more and remember more as it reduces the amount of knowledge lost through forgetting.
The Charanga Musical School scheme is divided in to six units to be covered over the course of each academic year.
Each Unit of Work comprises the strands of musical learning which correspond with the national curriculum for
music:
1. Listening and Appraising
2. Musical Activities- All musical activities are based around a song.
- Warm-up and Flexible Games- embed the Interrelated Dimensions of Music through repetition
- Singing- is at the heart of all the musical learning
- playing instruments- A sound-before-symbol approach is used but scores are provided as an understanding of notation is introduced to the children
- Improvisation- takes place within the units of work
- Composition- takes place within the units of work
3. Performing- Share what has taken place during the lesson and work towards performing to an audience.
Every lesson includes formative assessment opportunities for the teachers to use. Teachers use these assessments to adapt their teaching to suit the needs of the pupils. The success criteria of each lesson provide an opportunity for summative assessments. This summative data is collated by the class teacher at the end of each unit and is shared with the Music lead to inform a judgement on standards and progress – supporting accurate improvement planning to be made where required.
As a result of our carefully sequenced, planned and taught Music curriculum, children will:
- 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
- be able to sing and to use their voices
- create and compose music on their own and with others
- have the opportunity to learn a musical instrument
- use their musical skills, knowledge, and experiences to involve themselves in music, in a variety of different contexts.
- understand and explore how music is created, produced and communicated, including through the interrelated dimensions: pitch, duration, dynamics, tempo, timbre, texture, structure and appropriate musical notations
- develop a curiosity and love for music
- understand the value and importance of music in the wider community
Townville children will meet the end of Key Stage 1 National curriculum outcomes and will have a strong foundation on which to build and further develop their creative, musical skills and knowledge.
