Curriculum Intention:

Our Music curriculum is designed to enable students to express themselves freely through singing and playing instruments, and to access further musical opportunities at home, at school and in the future.  Music is taught both as a structured discipline and a source of joy.  Children’s musicianship and growing understanding of the abstract musical space is developed alongside their knowledge of music from different times and places and the technical skills required to sing and play instruments.  Music is experienced as performance, as self-expression, as audience (including professional live performance) and as an integral part of community.

Curriculum Implementation:

Our Specialist Music Teacher gives weekly music lessons to Y1-6 and leads two singing assemblies (Reception/KS1 and KS2).  In Reception, Music is integrated into the EYFS framework, at times both structured and spontaneous.  Children receive at least 1 hour of Music weekly.

• High quality singing:  encouraging natural voice production in step with age and vocal development leads by upper KS2 to part singing, solo singing and expressive vocal performance. Children have two opportunities to attend large singing festivals.
• Instruments:  our well-resourced music room has a wide variety of classroom instruments.  Children in KS2 are taught recorder and ukulele (in music lessons) and orchestral instruments (by a visiting specialist).  The school also offers one-to-one tuition from BEAT tutors in piano, brass, woodwind and strings.
• Musical notation is taught incrementally, progressing through pictorial and Kodály stick notation to conventional notation as well as guitar tab, chord charts and drum notations.
• Half-termly topics embrace a range of genres and musical forms, providing opportunities to listen to, perform and create music in different styles, whilst continually reinforcing aural skills, musical vocabulary and understanding of the interrelated dimensions of music.

Big Blue Question examples:

Is the language of music universal? 

Do we all hear music in the same way? 

Is there good and bad music or is it all a matter of taste?

Blue Sky Thinkers:

Cass Elliot, Edvard Grieg, BB King, Lin Manuel Miranda, Bob Marley, Freddy Mercury, Issachar Miron, Jacques Offenbach, Paul Rissmann, PI Tchaikovsky

Diversity: 

Western Classical Music both historic and contemporary, Brazilian Samba, Traditional Ghanaian song and drumming, Indian Classical Music, Blues and Reggae

Music Subject Leader - Ms Ros Savournin