Music is an essential and highly valued part of daily life at South Failsworth Primary School. Our aim is for the children to be reflective, creative and expressive musicians; developing their love and appreciation of music through the opportunities which we provide in school. These include; half termly music units of work, opportunities to play classroom instruments and access to individual music lessons in guitar and ukulele with Front Row Music. Children engage in weekly ‘Big Sing’ assemblies within their key stage and our KS1 and KS2 choirs meet regularly to learn and perform songs. Across the whole school, we listen to and appraise a ‘Song a Day’. These songs are carefully chosen to cover a wide range of genres and themes over the course of the year. Our music curriculum provides children with engaging and interactive lessons, where they develop their musical skills through listening and appraising music, creating, exploring and performing.
We follow the national curriculum for music which aims to ensure that all 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
- 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 inter-related dimensions: pitch, duration, dynamics, tempo, timbre, texture, structure and appropriate musical notations.
At South Failsworth, the content of the national curriculum for music is implemented through a scheme of work provided by Charanga Musical School. This scheme provides specialist and non-specialist teachers with high quality units of work which are fully aligned with the national curriculum. The key skills of communication, mathematics, ICT, problem solving, improving our own performance and working with others are promoted through our teaching of music.
As a scheme, Charanga enables an integrated, practical, exploratory approach to musical learning. The inter-related dimensions of music weave through all units of work to encourage the development and progression of musical skills across year groups. These units of work enable children to understand musical concepts through a repetition-based approach. This develops a more secure and deeper understanding of musical skills. The materials within the scheme ensure children are working at age related expectations, with regular opportunities for challenge.
Each unit of work compromises the strands of musical learning in line with the national curriculum - listening and appraising, musical activities and performing. During a unit of work, the children will listen to and appraise a range of music within a particular genre. Throughout their primary school journey, they will be exposed to a wide range of musical styles and genres from a variety of historical periods to the present day. The musical activities are based around an over-arching song for each unit. These activities include; warm-up games to embed the inter-related dimensions of music through repetition, singing, playing tuned and un-tuned classroom percussion instruments, improvising and composing. Children also perform and share their musical learning during and at the end of a unit.
The impact and measure of this is to ensure that children at South Failsworth generate a love and appreciation for many genres of music, possess embedded knowledge and skills and are able to transfer these into the key stage 3 curriculum.
Music is monitored by the subject leader throughout each year group using a variety of strategies, such as video evidence, class performances, lesson observations and pupil interviews to discuss learning and establish impact.