Music Approach

Musical skills and knowledge are taught sequentially using an active ‘hands on’ learning approach which promotes performance as a primary discipline whilst integrating composition and listening also.  

Our approach is adapted and taught with our children in mind to make learning music inclusive and enjoyable.  Children build up their musical understanding, knowledge and skills through listening, improvising, composing, practising and performing both individually and collaboratively.  Many opportunities are given for children to share their work both in class and to the wider school, to celebrate achievement and instil a sense of pride in themselves and their work.   

 KS1: 

In KS1 we use the ‘Jolly Music’ curriculum to practically introduce our young musicians to pulse, rhythm and pitch through singing, movement, and musical games.  This is combined with a more topic-based cross-curricular approach later in the year (using ‘Charanga’ as a resource) where children are encouraged to build on their prior learning and combine voices with tuned and untuned instruments to create, select and combine sounds. 

 KS2: 

As students progress into KS2, we encourage a more critical engagement with music through a specially designed curriculum, enabling them to compose, discerningly listen, and perform with confidence. Our KS2 children are fortunate to receive WCIT (whole class instrumental tuition) on the recorder (in years 3 and 4) and ukulele (in years 5 and 6).  These ‘gateway’ instruments are used to introduce the reading of staff notation and the technical aspects of woodwind and string playing.  Many choose to continue with playing these instruments for enjoyment during lessons (where schemes of learning in the Winter and Summer terms lend themselves to it) and extra-curricular clubs, some may progress on to having lessons with one of our many visiting instrumental teachers.