Music

Subject Leader - Miss S Dunne

Our Music teaching aims to encourage pupils’ creativity, imagination, musical experiences and musical vocabulary, encouraging them to think like musicians and potential musical artists. The intention is for pupils to develop their confidence in music using a skills-based approach where key musical concepts and themes are developed and revisited across the year groups, building on their previous knowledge and understanding at every stage.

We promote enjoyment of music, and thinking of music as a powerful form of human expression, helping pupils to understand its role across different cultures, time-periods and creative industries. It encourages children to value originality, and to reflect critically on their own work and that of others.

We support staff in developing their subject knowledge and confidence, enabling the delivery of rich, engaging and purposeful lessons. The curriculum is both inclusive and aspirational, ensuring all pupils are able to enjoy, create and respond to music in meaningful ways.

For children to understand pulse, they need to feel it and the songs and activities we use help them do just that! We begin by learning to recognise the pulse. We explore percussive instruments and perform simple instrumental accompaniments to familiar songs ensuring we keep in time with the pulse. We progress to copying and creating simple rhythm patterns, eventually using simple graphic notations to represent these sounds.

We explore how we can produce sounds in different ways using our voices and instruments. We listen to a variety of music including Flight Of The Bumblebee and William Tell Overture, where we begin to recognise how composers use dynamics, tempo and timbre to bring a character or theme to life through music! We learn to sing simple songs as a class – focussing on how adding facial expressions and actions can enhance our performance. We explore song lyrics and use these as a basis for their own compositions. We also begin following musical instructions and invent our own musical notation to represent a sequence of sounds.

We learn to identify and describe pitch. We explore the sounds created by a variety of different instruments and voices, and describe their pitch and timbre. We play simple listening games to help us to identify simple pitch patterns, and recognise when the pitch gets higher or lower. We use a variety of tuned and un-tuned percussion instruments to compose simple sound effects to accompany sections of a story. Finally, we compose pitch patterns and represent these using creative graphic notation tools such as pipe cleaners and coloured cubes!

 

From body percussion to disco music, this unit continues to develop our understanding of pulse and rhythm. We begin with songs and activities to get us performing together rhythmically. We perform actions and movements to a steady pulse and play simple musical passing games. We investigate different ways to play rhythms, varying instrumental timbre and dynamics.  We work as a class and in small groups, to learn to play a simple accompaniment to a song or poem, selecting suitable sounds and timbre. Finally, we learn to create simple four-beat rhythms and represent these using graphic notations such as Beat Monsters!  

We learn how songs and music can communicate different moods and emotions as we investigate different ways to express the mood of a song by adding facial expressions and changing the timbre and dynamics of our voices. We develop our understanding of musical mood through simple songs, where we introduce major and minor tonality.

We listen to, and talk about, a wide variety of music including Can-Can from Orpheus in the Underworld by Offenbach and Fanfarra Cabua-Le-Le by Sergio Mendes/Carlinhos Brown. As we listen to these, we learn to represent the sounds we hear using graphic symbols and musical doodles!

Working as a class and in small groups, we compose and improvise music on the theme of weather! We learn to give musical instructions by taking the role of a conductor in a small group where we create descriptive sounds and a simple soundscape.

Here we explore pitch and melody. From the octobass to the piccolo, we find out about a variety of instruments and learn to describe their pitch and timbre. We play simple listening games to allow us to recall a pitch sequence, recognise where the pitch gets higher, lower or stays the same. Through a range of songs, we develop our pitch-matching skills, performing with actions and movement. We learn to use our voices more creatively to match graphic notations such as vocal story maps and pipe-cleaner notation. We play simple melodies using tuned percussion where we introduce the pentatonic scale with songs such as Just Five Notes. 

 

Each week we come together as a whole school for a wonderful sing-song! We learn how to use our diaphragm to support our voices as well as visualisations and facial placements to help us achieve our best quality of voice.

Choir runs after school each week, where we learn lots of fun and challenging songs. We perform at school events and in the local community.

 

Our Year 2 children are given the opportunity to learn a musical instrument in a ‘rock band’ setting. They are taught current and popular songs on keyboard, drums, electric guitar and bass guitar as well as how to rock a microphone. Each term ends in a VIP rock concert for the children’s parents!