Music

Music Lead - Mrs R Whittaker

At Laughton All Saints’ C of E Primary Academy, we understand that Music is a universal language that embodies one of the highest forms of creativity. We help enable our children to understand 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. As our pupils progress, they develop a critical engagement with music, allowing them to compose, and to listen with discrimination to the best in the musical canon. We ensure that pupils perform, listen to, review and evaluate music across a range of historical periods, genres, styles and traditions, including the works of the great composers and musicians. We support our children to learn to sing and to use their voices, to create and compose music on their own and with others, have the opportunity to learn a musical instrument, use technology appropriately and have the opportunity to progress to the next level of musical excellence. We encourage our children to understand and explore how music is created, produced and communicated. Through assemblies, concerts and performances our children are able to express their emotions and showcase their understanding of how to perform with awareness of others. Our vision is to provide a high quality music education that engages and inspires pupils to develop a love of music and their talent as musicians, and so increase their self-confidence, creativity and sense of achievement.

To find out more about our rationale and intent, please click below:

Music Subject Rationale

“Music is all around us. It is the soundtrack to our lives. Music connects us through people and places in our ever-changing world. It is creative, collaborative, celebratory and challenging. In our schools, music can bring communities together through the shared endeavour of whole-school singing, ensemble playing, experimenting with the creative process and, through the love of listening to friends and fellow pupils, performing. The sheer joy of music making can feed the soul of a school community, enriching each student while strengthening the shared bonds of support and trust which make a great school. ” (Quotation from the DfE’s Model Music Curriculum).

At Laughton All Saints’, we understand the importance of music to connect children to others (working as a team to create and perform) while at the same time encouraging creativity and discipline. We know that working together, being creative and practising in a disciplined way teaches our children to be disciplined, resilient, confident learners, and music enables all of this to happen. This is why music plays such a crucial part of our curriculum at our school.

Our music curriculum:

We follow the national curriculum for music. Here is a link to the national curriculum documentation: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-music-programmes-of-study/national-curriculum-in-england-music-programmes-of-study

Aims and ambitions for music:

Our aim is for all pupils to:

Perform, listen to, review and evaluate music across a range of historical periods, genres, styles and traditions, including the works of the great composers and musicians.
Learn to sing and to use their voices, to create and compose music on their own and with others, have the opportunity to learn a musical instrument, use technology appropriately and have the opportunity to progress to the next level of musical excellence.
Understand and explore how music is created, produced and communicated, including through the interrelated dimensions: pitch, duration, dynamics, tempo, timbre, texture, structure and appropriate musical notations.

What do we expect our children to learn in music by the end of each key stage?

In early years:

Listen with increased attention to sounds.
Respond to what they have heard, expressing their thoughts and feelings.
Remember and sing entire songs.
Sing the pitch of a tune sung by another person (‘pitch match’).
Sing the melodic shape (moving melody, such as up and down, down and up) of familiar songs.
Sing in a group or on their own.
Create their own songs or improvise a song around one they know.
Play instruments with increasing control to express their feelings and ideas.

Key stage 1

Use their voices expressively and creatively by singing songs and speaking chants and rhymes
Play tuned and untuned instruments musically
Listen with concentration and understanding to a range of high-quality live and recorded music
Experiment with, create, select and combine sounds using the interrelated dimensions of music

Key Stage 2:

By the time our pupils leave our school, we aim for them to be able to sing and play musically with increasing confidence and control. They should develop an understanding of musical composition, organising and manipulating ideas within musical structures and reproducing sounds from aural memory.

We teach pupils to:

Play and perform in solo and ensemble contexts, using their voices and playing musical instruments with increasing accuracy, fluency, control and expression.
Improvise and compose music for a range of purposes using the interrelated dimensions of music.
Listen with attention to detail and recall sounds with increasing aural memory.
Use and understand staff and other musical notations.
Appreciate and understand a wide range of high-quality live and recorded music drawn from different traditions and from great composers and musicians.
Develop an understanding of the history of music.

Knowledge in music:

Knowledge is broken down into two main types:

Substantive knowledge: knowing about the technical and wider elements of music (the facts).
Disciplinary knowledge: knowing how to apply this knowledge in practice to control sounds and create music.

Children learn about technical elements of music as they progress through school. Their knowledge of the technical elements of music become increasingly complex and deep as they return to them regularly at each stage of their learning.

Technical knowledge in music includes:

the accurate production of sounds using the voice, an instrument or music technology.
the ability to use staff notation and other systems such as learning by ear or chord symbols for the communication of music.

Children also gain constructional knowledge and understand of the musical elements used in performance, composition and listening. This includes knowledge about the components of composition: what we need to include in compositions and how we put a composition together.

Finally, children gain expressive knowledge about musical quality in performance, composition and listening. So, for example, they learn how to add tone and expression to their performance by varying the use of dynamics. This improves the quality of their musical performance. By studying composers, they find out about how the expressive knowledge composers use in their music and compositions too. In our school, we study a breadth of composers to expose children to a wealth of musical experiences from across the world and throughout history. This includes popular music, classical music and musical from around the world.

How have we designed our curriculum?

We use the Charanga scheme to structure our curriculum. We chose this scheme because it sequences learning in music throughout each year group and supports our staff well to deliver the music curriculum.

The scheme covers the following in each lesson:

Listen and Appraise
Musical Activities include Games, Singing, Playing, Improvising and Composing
Perform/Share

Progression in music:

Our interrelated dimensions of music chart shows how we sequence the curriculum so that it is spiral, and builds progressively on knowledge (substantive knowledge and disciplinary knowledge) over time: