Music

In Music we perform, compose, listen and appraise music!

The teaching of Music in Stranton Primary School fits in with our rationale and aims for our whole school curriculum:

They include ensuring that the curriculum:

• Has the needs of the children at the heart of everything we do
• Is based on a strong foundation of oracy
• Meets the needs of our local community
• Is full of exciting, enriching and enjoyable learning experiences
• Provides opportunities for our children, staff and parents to all learn together.
• Positively improves academic outcomes
• Prepares our children to become positive role models in and effective contributors to Society
• Gives our pupils the chance to become the very best versions of themselves.

Or in short, a curriculum which provides only the very best education, opportunities and experiences for all of our pupils.

Vision for Music

The aim of music teaching, here at Stranton Primary School is to give pupils the skills and opportunities to be able to create, play, perform and enjoy music. We want to engage and inspire pupils to develop a love of music and their talent as musicians as well as ensuring lifelong opportunities for the development of imagination, sensitivity, inventiveness and risk-taking.

This will be done by ensuring our children:

• know and understand how sounds are made and then organised into musical structures;
• know how music is made through a variety of instruments;
• know how music is composed and written down;
• know how music is influenced by the time, place and purpose for which it was written;
• develop the interrelated skills of performing, composing and appreciating music.
• develop a love for music by listening to and appreciating a range of music styles and musicians.

Curriculum End Points 

By the end of Key Stage 1, we want ALL pupils to:

• Use their voices expressively and creatively by singing songs and speaking chants and rhymes
• Play tuned and untuned instruments musically
• Listen with concentration and understanding to a range of high-quality live and recorded music
• Experiment with, create, select and combine sounds using the inter-related dimensions of music.

By the end of Key Stage 2, we want ALL pupils to:

• Sing and play musically with increasing confidence and control
• Develop an understanding of musical composition, organising and manipulating ideas within musical structures
• Reproduce sounds from aural memory.

Pupils should be taught to:

• Play and perform in solo and ensemble contexts, using their voices and playing musical instruments with increasing accuracy, fluency, control and expression
• Improvise and compose music for a range of purposes using the inter-related dimensions of music
• Listen with attention to detail and recall sounds with increasing aural memory
• Use and understand staff and other musical notations
• Appreciate and understand a wide range of high-quality live and recorded music drawn from different traditions and from great composers and musicians
• Develop an understanding of the history of music.

Teaching of Music

Music topics are taught termly, with music objectives fully embedded within each area. Objectives are progressive and sequential; teaching children an array of skills that enable them to create, play, perform and enjoy music.

The school uses a variety of teaching and learning approaches in Music lessons, including:

• Encouraging children to participate in a variety of musical experiences through which we aim to build up the confidence of all children.
• Singing lies at the heart of good music teaching. Our teaching focuses on developing the children’s ability to sing in tune and with other people. Through singing songs, children learn about the structure and organisation of music.
• Teaching them to listen to and appreciate different forms of music. As children get older, we expect them to maintain their concentration for longer, and to listen to more extended pieces of music.
• Children develop descriptive skills in music lessons when learning about how music can represent feelings and emotions. We teach children to make music together, to understand musical notation, and to compose pieces.
• The use of external music ‘experts’ – including drumming, brass and strings.
• Using the specialist programmes – ‘First Thing Music’ across Year 1 and Year 2 and Charanga across Year 3-6 to support the teaching of music.

We recognise the fact that we have children of differing ability in all our classes, and so we provide suitable learning opportunities for all children by matching the challenge of the task to the ability of the child. We achieve this through a range of strategies, which are differentiated by task, expected outcome and/or support from peers or adults.

Recording of Music

Children will record pieces of musical work - either individually or as a collective, which will then be shared during exhibitions, on Seesaw or via our social media platforms.

Assessment of Music

In order to assess the children’s knowledge in Music, teachers will track the children’s progress against what has been taught to allow them to identify gaps in learning. This will enable misconceptions or knowledge which hasn’t been retained to be addressed in the ‘revisit’ section of future lessons. At the end of each term, teachers will give an overall judgement of each child, recording attainment on the school’s curriculum tracking sheet. This judgement will be based on evidence from their performance in class. Teachers will also conduct observational assessments of children during lessons and assess verbal responses from children in line with our oracy framework.

Monitoring of Music

Monitoring takes place regularly through sampling children’s work, lesson observations and through talking to the children – ensuring they enjoy each subject and can recall key knowledge of what they have been taught.

 Music Curriculum Overview

Music Objectives by Year Group