Our Music Intent:

‘Roots to Grow and Wings to Fly’

Our music curriculum is based upon our Christian vision and first and foremost helps children to feel that they are musical, and to become rooted with a life-long love of music. We focus on developing the skills, knowledge and understanding that children need in order to fly as confident performers, composers, and listeners. Our curriculum introduces children to music from all around the world and across generations, teaching children to respect and appreciate the music of all traditions and communities.

It is our aim that all children will:

• Create an enthusiastic attitude towards music through a high quality and engaging music curriculum.
• Have a coherent, relevant, broad and balanced curriculum through unit focuses on different musical aspects and dimensions.
• Develop their musical skills of singing, playing tuned and un-tuned instruments, and performing.
• Improvise and compose music.
• Listen and appraise a wide range of music from different genres and time periods.
• Have an inclusive curriculum delivery where all pupils access the same offer to ensure equity of provision and high expectations and outcomes.

How We Teach Music:

Music at By Brook Valley is taught using Kapow. It takes a holistic approach to music, in which the individual strands below are woven together to create engaging and enriching learning experiences. These include: Listening and Evaluating, Creating Sound, Notation, Improvising and Composing, Performing. Each unit combines these strands within a cross-curricular topic designed to capture pupils’ imagination and encourage them to explore music enthusiastically. Over the course of the curriculum, children will be taught how to sing fluently and expressively, and play tuned and untuned instruments accurately and with control. They will learn to recognise and name the interrelated dimensions of music - pitch, duration, tempo, timbre, structure, texture and dynamics - and use these expressively in their own improvisations and compositions.

It is a spiral curriculum model where previous skills and knowledge are returned to and built upon. Children progress in terms of tackling more complex tasks and doing more simple tasks better, as well as developing understanding and knowledge of the history of music, staff, and other musical notations, the interrelated dimensions of music and more.

Pupils will actively participate in musical activities drawn from a range of styles and traditions, developing their musical skills and their understanding of how music works. Lessons incorporate a range of teaching strategies from independent tasks, paired and group work, as well as improvisation and teacher-led performances. Lessons are ‘hands-on’ and incorporate movement and dance elements, as well as making cross-curricular links with other areas of learning.

Lessons can be differentiated so they can be accessed by all pupils and opportunities to stretch pupils’ learning are available when required. Knowledge organisers for each unit support pupils in building a foundation of factual knowledge by encouraging recall of key facts and vocabulary.