Music
Music Lead – Mr M Porter
At Rossington St Michael’s, we understand that Music is a universal language that embodies one of the highest forms of creativity. We help enable our children to understand musical concepts through a repetition-based approach to learning. Learning about the same musical concept through different musical activities enables a more secure, deeper learning and mastery of musical skills. As our pupils progress, they develop a critical engagement with music, allowing them to compose, and to listen with discrimination to the best in the musical canon. We ensure that pupils 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. We support our children to learn to sing and to use their voices, to create and compose music on their own and with others, have the opportunity to learn a musical instrument, use technology appropriately and have the opportunity to progress to the next level of musical excellence. We encourage our children to understand and explore how music is created, produced and communicated. Through assemblies, concerts and performances our children are able to express their emotions and showcase their understanding of how to perform with awareness of others. Our vision is to provide a high quality music education that engages and inspires pupils to develop a love of music and their talent as musicians, and so increase their self-confidence, creativity and sense of achievement.
To find out more about our rationale and intent, please click below:
Music Subject Rationale
“Music is all around us. It is the soundtrack to our lives. Music connects us through people and places in our ever-changing world. It is creative, collaborative, celebratory and challenging. In our schools, music can bring communities together through the shared endeavour of whole-school singing, ensemble playing, experimenting with the creative process and, through the love of listening to friends and fellow pupils, performing. The sheer joy of music making can feed the soul of a school community, enriching each student while strengthening the shared bonds of support and trust which make a great school. ” (Quotation from the DfE’s Model Music Curriculum).
At Rossington St Michael’s, we understand the importance of music to connect children to others (working as a team to create and perform) while at the same time encouraging creativity and discipline. We know that working together, being creative and practising in a disciplined way teaches our children to be disciplined, resilient, confident learners, and music enables all of this to happen. This is why music plays such a crucial part of our curriculum at our school.
Our Music Curriculum:
We follow the national curriculum for music. Here is a link to the national curriculum documentation: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-music-programmes-of-study/national-curriculum-in-england-music-programmes-of-study
Aims and ambitions for music:
Our aim is for all pupils to:
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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.
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Learn to sing and to use their voices, to create and compose music on their own and with others, have the opportunity to learn a musical instrument, use technology appropriately and have the opportunity to progress to the next level of musical excellence.
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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.
What do we expect our children to learn in music by the end of each key stage?
In early years:
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Listen with increased attention to sounds.
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Respond to what they have heard, expressing their thoughts and feelings.
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Remember and sing entire songs.
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Sing the pitch of a tune sung by another person (‘pitch match’).
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Sing the melodic shape (moving melody, such as up and down, down and up) of familiar songs.
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Sing in a group or on their own.
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Create their own songs or improvise a song around one they know.
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Play instruments with increasing control to express their feelings and ideas.
Key stage 1
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Use their voices expressively and creatively by singing songs and speaking chants and rhymes
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Play tuned and untuned instruments musically
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Listen with concentration and understanding to a range of high-quality live and recorded music
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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:
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Play and perform in solo and ensemble contexts, using their voices and playing musical instruments with increasing accuracy, fluency, control and expression.
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Improvise and compose music for a range of purposes using the interrelated dimensions of music.
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Listen with attention to detail and recall sounds with increasing aural memory.
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Use and understand staff and other musical notations.
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Appreciate and understand a wide range of high-quality live and recorded music drawn from different traditions and from great composers and musicians.
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Develop an understanding of the history of music.
Knowledge in Music:
Knowledge is broken down into two main types:
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Substantive knowledge: knowing about the technical and wider elements of music (the facts).
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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:
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the accurate production of sounds using the voice, an instrument or music technology.
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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.
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:
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Listen and Appraise
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Musical Activities include Games, Singing, Playing, Improvising and Composing
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Perform/Share
Progression in Music:
Our interrelated dimensions of music chart shows how we sequence the curriculum so that it is spiral, and builds progressively on knowledge (substantive knowledge and disciplinary knowledge) over time:
Click here to view the overview of our curriculum (Charanga):
Click here to view the music vocabulary we teach children, and how it is sequenced for each year group:
Click here to view our musical passports (what children will be able to know and do in music to be ready for the next year group in school):
MY MUSIC PASSPORT - YEAR 1 TO 2
MY MUSIC PASSPORT - YEAR 2 TO 3
MY MUSIC PASSPORT - YEAR 3 TO 4
MY MUSIC PASSPORT - YEAR 4 TO 5
MY MUSIC PASSPORT - YEAR 5 TO 6
Click here to see what we teach children about musical styles:
Click here to see a sample planning document for each year group:
Extra Curricular Music
At Rossington St Michael’s CE Primary School, we believe that all of our children should be given the opportunity to achieve.In music, alongside our curriculum, our children have the opportunity to learn instruments and further develop their creative side.
Within school, all children are welcome to learn an instrument. During lessons, children use percussion instruments, wind and string instruments alongside their singing voices.
In Key Stage 2, children are given the opportunity to learn, via our peripatetic teachers, musical instruments. These include:
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flute
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clarinet
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brass instruments
Children leave our school achieving high grades within their chosen instrument.
Children have also left our school on full musical scholarships to private secondary schools.
Outside of our school curriculum, children can:
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participate in after-school choir. This is open to our KS2 children in preparation for any concerts and performances. Children learn from a variety of music genres.
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take part in Young Voices. This is where children join in, as part of the largest choir in the world, with thousands of other children to sing and perform.
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join in with our junior choir to participate in a local Sing Up performance.