What do we expect our children to learn in music by the end of each key stage?

In Early Years:

1.Listen with increased attention to sounds.

2.Respond to what they have heard, expressing their thoughts and feelings.

3.Remember and sing entire songs.

4.Sing the pitch of a tune sung by another person (‘pitch match’).

5.Sing the melodic shape (moving melody, such as up and down, down and up) of familiar songs.

6.Sing in a group or on their own.

7.Create their own songs or improvise a song around one they know.

8.Play instruments with increasing control to express their feelings and ideas .

Key stage 1

1.Use their voices expressively and creatively by singing songs and speaking chants and rhymes

2.Play tuned and untuned instruments musically

3.Listen with concentration and understanding to a range of high-quality live and recorded music

4.Experiment with, create, select and combine sounds using the interrelated dimensions of music

Key Stage 2:

By the time our pupils leave our school, we aim for them to be able to sing and play musically with increasing confidence and control. They should develop an understanding of musical composition, organising and manipulating ideas within musical structures and reproducing sounds from aural memory.

We teach pupils to:

1.Play and perform in solo and ensemble contexts, using their voices and playing musical instruments with increasing accuracy, fluency, control and expression.

2.Improvise and compose music for a range of purposes using the interrelated dimensions of music.

3.Listen with attention to detail and recall sounds with increasing aural memory.

4.Use and understand staff and other musical notations.

5.Appreciate and understand a wide range of high-quality live and recorded music drawn from different traditions and from great composers and musicians.

6.Develop an understanding of the history of music.

How have we designed our curriculum ?

We use the Charanga scheme to structure our curriculum. We chose this scheme because it sequences learning in music throughout each year group and supports our staff well to deliver the music curriculum.

The scheme covers the following in each lesson:

1. Listen and Appraise
2. Musical Activities include Games, Singing, Playing, Improvising and Composing
3. Perform/Share

Knowledge in music:

Knowledge is broken down into two main types:

1.Substantive knowledge: knowing about the technical and wider elements of music (the facts).

2.Disciplinary knowledge: knowing how to apply this knowledge in practice to control sounds and create music.

Children learn about technical elements of music as they progress through school. Their knowledge of the technical elements of music become increasingly complex and deep as they return to them regularly at each stage of their learning.

Technical knowledge in music includes:

–  the accurate production of sounds using the voice, an instrument or music technology.

–  the ability to use staff notation and other systems such as learning by ear or chord symbols for the communication of music.

Children also gain constructional knowledge and understand of the musical elements used in performance, composition and listening. This includes knowledge about the components of composition: what we need to include in compositions and how we put a composition together.

Finally, children gain expressive knowledge about musical quality in performance, composition and listening. So, for example, they learn how to add tone and expression to their performance by varying the use of dynamics. This improves the quality of their musical performance. By studying composers, they find out about how the expressive knowledge composers use in their music and compositions too. In our school, we study a breadth of composers to expose children to a wealth of musical experiences from across the world and throughout history. This includes popular music, classical music and musical from around the world.