Coppice Farm Primary School

INTENT

Music is a universal language that embodies one of the highest forms of creativity and music will be embedded across our curriculum.

The National Curriculum for music aims to ensure that all children:

• perform, listen to, review and evaluate music
• be taught to sing, create and compose music
• understand and explore how music is created, produced and communicated

Our children will be inspired and engaged by music education. Music lesson will engage and inspire pupils to develop a love of music and develop their talent as musicians, and in turn increase their self-confidence, creativity and sense of achievement. As pupils progress, they should develop a critical engagement with music, allowing them to compose, and to listen with
discrimination to the best in the musical canon.

The Charanga scheme of work is used throughout school to ensure a wide exposure to different genres of music, with lots of practical opportunities to explore and develop as musicians and singers. Children will experience  instrument tuition with whole class lessons for recorders and glockenspiels as well as weekly singing.

All Key Stage 2 children have the opportunity to access musical instrument tuition, including piano and keyboards, violin, trumpet and guitar with specialist tutors from Nottingham Music Tuition.

Additional opportunities are offered in music, such as the key stage 2 choir which will perform in school and at events in the local community as well as the Young Voices concert.. We also have a whole school singing assembly once a week.

IMPLEMENTATION

All music lessons are delivered by our Music Lead, Mrs Antcliffe.

Our music curriculum ensures children sing, listen, play, perform and evaluate. This is embedded in the classroom through the structured music programme Charanga as well as weekly singing assemblies, various concerts and performances, choir and instrument teaching from specialist tutors. The elements of music are taught in the classroom lessons so that children are able to use some of the language of music to dissect it, and understand how it is made, played, appreciated and analysed. In the classroom children learn key aspects of music through cross-curricular links. They also learn how to compose, focusing on different dimensions of music, which in turn feeds their understanding when listening, playing, or analysing music. Composing or performing using body percussion and vocal sounds is also part of the curriculum, which develops the understanding of musical elements without the added complexity of an instrument.

Each skill needs to be repeated and embedded in order to be achieved. For effective musical learning to take place our approach is to embed and demonstrate these skills in different ways and at different times (e.g. different tempos, different time signatures), building confidence, ability and competence.

IMPACT

Musical skills and understanding are built year on year, from singing nursery rhymes and action songs from memory and performing simple rhythm patterns on tuned and untuned percussion instruments in Early Years, progressing their skills and understanding in KS1 where the children also experience whole class instrumental tuition on the recorder or glockenspiel.

Further developing their skills and knowledge of the subject in lower KS2,  the children access music more confidently, and continue to build the ability to read and follow a simple musical or graphical score. Throughout all of this the children’s enjoyment of music is a key element, running alongside the ‘taught’ musical skills and objectives.

Children’s work in music is assessed by making informal judgements as they are observed during lessons. The assessment materials from the Charanga scheme
of work are also used to support this.

At the end of the year, a summary judgement  of each pupil in relation to the skills the children have developed in-line with the National Curriculum these are reported to parents as part of the child’s annual school report.