Music curriculum information
curriculum overview
intent
Music is a skills-based subject that can inspire, challenge and evoke wonderful creativity within pupils. At Lakefield, we value music very highly with singing at the heart of daily whole school worship. Through our broad and varied curriculum, we aim to help children feel they are musical and to develop a lifelong love of music. We help each child to develop skills, knowledge and understanding that they need to become confident musicians who can perform, compose and listen. We strive to introduce children to a range of musical genres from around the world and to appreciate and respect music from different traditions and communities. Children will also develop the musical skills of singing, listening and responding, composing and improvising, playing tuned and untuned instruments.
implementation
Within the EYFS setting, music is an integral part of children’s learning journey. Rhyme and rhythm are utilised throughout the learning of phonics, handwriting and mathematics. Children learn a wide range of songs and rhymes and develop skills for performing together. Singing and music making opportunities are used frequently to embed learning, develop musical awareness and to demonstrate how music can be used to express feelings.
Alongside our curriculum provision for music, pupils also can participate in additional 1:1 music teaching by being offered the opportunity to learn a musical instrument with peripatetic teachers. Our peripatetic music teaching is organised by the Gloucestershire Music Service. Children in year 3 benefit from recorders tuition whilst children in Year 4 benefit from whole class specialist teaching, delivered by a member of Gloucestershire Music Services. These lessons allow children the opportunity to learn to play an instrument as part of an ensemble and to engender a love of music learning.
Performance is at the heart of musical teaching and learning at Lakefield and pupils participate in a range of performances during their school ‘career’. These include nativities (KS1), Harvest performances (Years 3 – 4) and a Leavers performance (Year 6), iSingpop, Church performances and recitals, rock school and weekly choral worship.
Pupils who are confident are encouraged to perform in solo performances as part of our music soiree. Parents are invited and welcomed to watch all these performances whether at school or outside of school. Pupils also can join the school choir and to participate in the Young Voices concert.
The children have weekly class music lessons covering the National Curriculum, which includes all areas (Performing, listening, composing, history of music, inter-related dimensions of music). This is part of our spiral curriculum for music where progression and knowledge is mapped across the school allowing previously taught skills and knowledge to be returned to and built upon. In each of the lessons the children actively participate in musical activities drawn from a range of styles and traditions, developing their musical skills and their understanding of how music works.
impact
At Lakefield, we strive to ensure that children are confident performers, composers and listeners who can express themselves musically. We are a school with a musical ethos where all children engage positively with music at their own level. They love to perform and are encouraged to show their talents and skills at every opportunity.
At the end of each module/term the children undertake a quick knowledge based quiz as part of our assessment routines to help us gauge the impact of the topic and curriculum.
knowledge organisers
What is a ‘Knowledge Organiser’?
A Knowledge Organiser is a go-to document for a Unit of work: each one identifies the key information that children can refer to in lessons for a particular Unit of work, and it also acts as a tool to support children in retaining and retrieving knowledge for life-long learning.
How do they help children?
They provide the essential knowledge that children need to cover in the Unit, shared at the beginning so children know what they are going to be learning.
Knowledge Organisers help them to remember key dates, key people, key events, vocabulary and definitions and key concepts.
They can be used as a fun assessment tool to help remember the Units.
They improve their ability to remember.
Knowledge Organisers help them to develop other skills - e.g. when writing a nonfiction report, if they already have the knowledge they can focus on the writing skills.
How do they help parents?
Parents will have a better understanding of what the children are learning. They will allow parents to build on their knowledge at home and provide an easy tool for parents to quiz children at home (and children to quiz parents!)
The Knowledge Organisers are used to support the delivery of the curriculum and contain a list of technical vocabulary with definitions. Each organiser also has an accompanying quiz, which is regularly taken by the children in school to help children recall the key knowledge from each Unit of work.
Examples of the Knowledge Organisers can be seen to the right.