Music at Lordship Lane

Intent

• To develop children’s knowledge. Music at Lordship Lane equips them with the knowledge and skills to critically engage with music, allowing them to compose and to listen with discrimination to a wide range of music
• To build children’s cultural capital.  Children will be equipped with the essential knowledge, behaviours and skills that they need to become educated citizens.  We believe that this is a key ingredient in ensuring that our pupils are successful in society, their career and the world of work.
• To build children’s Music vocabulary. We ensure children at Lordship Lane develop subject specific vocabulary of Computing technology to enable them to fully grasp the knowledge taught.
• To celebrate our diverse community.  Our families have originated from a variety of different places around the world.  We enable the children to learn about music and musicians from different cultures and ensure that our children can see themselves in our curriculum.

Implementation

• Curriculum Foundations. Class teachers have begun to use the Charanga scheme to teach Music to their classes, with support from our specialist Music teacher.

• EYFS Children experience a wide variety of musical styles.  They begin to understand that they can move with the pulse of the music and that the words of songs can tell stories and pain pictures.  They learn to sing or rap nursery rhymes and simple songs from memory and begin to understand that a performance is a sharing of this music. 

• KS1 By the end of KS1, children learn to sing or rap 5 songs each year off by heart, learning what the songs are about and beginning to recognise the sound and names of some of the instruments they use.  They also learn that some songs have a chorus or a response/answer part and that songs have a musical style.  Children learn that music has a steady pulse, like a heartbeat, and that they can create rhythms from a range of words.  They learn that rhythms are different from the steady pulse and that we add high and low sounds, pitch, when we sing and play our instruments.  They learn the names of the notes in their instrumental part and learn the names of the instrument they are playing.  They learn that improvisation is about making up your own tunes on the spot and that when someone improvises they make up their own tune that has never been heard before.  Children learn that composing is like writing a story with music and that a performance is sharing music with other people, called an audience.
• KS2 By the end of KS2, children learn five songs a year from memory, who sang or wrote them, when they were written and why.  Children are able to talk about the style indicators of the songs and what the lyrics are about.  They can talk about the musical dimensions featured in the song, e.g. texture, dynamics, tempo, rhythm, pitch and timbre, and discuss how these work together to create a song or piece of music.  Children can talk about different ways of writing music down, e.g. staff notation and symbols, and the instruments they might play or be played in a band or orchestra.  They can identify well-known improvising musicians and can use some of the riffs and licks taught within their own improvisations.  Children understand that a composition is a piece of music that is created by them and kept in some way and can use notation to record this.  They understand that a performance is planned and different for each occasion.  Children learn that a performance involves communicating ideas, thoughts and feelings and the song/music. 

Teaching Approaches

• Children receive one 45-minute Music lesson each week. 
• Each lesson involves Listening and Appraising, Musical Activities and Performing.  The musical activities include: warm-up games, optional flexible games, singing, playing instruments, improvisation and composition. 
• Children gain a thorough grasp of 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.  Over time, children will both develop new musical skills and concepts and re-visit established musical skills and concepts.
• Children will all learn to play the glockenspiel. 

Impact

Children will develop a deep understanding of a wide range of musical skills and concepts.  They will sing and play musically, with increasing confidence and control.  Children will develop an understanding of musical composition, organising and manipulating ideas within musical structures and reproducing sounds from aural memory.  Charanga assessment documentation supports teachers in assessing their classes. 

Half termly overview