Our vision statement & intent
At Sunnybrow Primary school, we intend to provide a music curriculum that empowers children to believe that they are musical and develop a life-long love of music. We focus on developing the skills, knowledge and understanding that children need in order to become confident performers, composers and listeners. We intend to provide a music curriculum that supports the development of singing, playing tuned and untuned instruments, improvising and composing music, and listening and responding to music.
Our curriculum in based around the principle ‘ordinary people can achieve extraordinary things.’ We intend to expose our children to music from all around the world and across generations to introduce children to inspirational role-models and to teach children to respect and appreciate the music of all traditions and communities. Click here to view the list of musicians covered in the music curriculum.
We have produced an ‘end-of-year’ expectation document, which outlines where we intend our pupils to be at the end of the academic year.
Implementation
We have chosen to follow Kapow’s Music scheme for EYFS, KS1 & KS2 to ensure all children at Sunnybrow Primary School receive a consistently high quality of teaching and learning. We can ensure that all teachers, irrespective of their own personal skill or confidence levels can deliver quality lessons.
The Scheme of Work meets the requirements for the National Curriculum for Music, and enables our teachers to deliver creative, inspiring and engaging lessons. The scheme is a spiral curriculum and provides for progression in skills and knowledge, with key concepts being revisited again and again. The curriculum content covers the following areas:
The scheme takes a holistic approach to music, in which individual strands are woven together to create engaging and enriching learning experiences:
- Performing
- Listening
- Composing
- The history of music
- The interrelated dimensions of music
Each 5 lesson unit combines these strands within a cross-curricular topic designed to capture children’s imagination and encourage them to explore music enthusiastically. Over the course of the curriculum, pupils will learn 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.
In EYFS, KS1 and KS2, pupils participate in weekly music assemblies and a one hour curriculum music lesson. In Class 3, the children will complete a term of the complementary instrumental scheme to develop their expertise in using a tuned instrument, as recommended in the Model music curriculum.
We have created a singing assembly format, which compromises of two elements: one element is a bank of songs, from a range of genres and musicians, that we want every child to have listened too by the time they leave in Year 6. The other element is a list of the core songs we want children to be able to sing by heart before they leave us. The songs are either linked to our HEART values or are traditional hymns.
Read our Singing Assembly schedule click here.
Music Planning Documents:
Music end of year expectations
Music Small Steps of Progression
Kapow Music-vocabulary coverage
Impact
Our use of the Kapow music scheme of work means that all staff are able to plan and deliver effective, challenging and enjoyable units work, which allows for progression across the school as well as ensuring all strands of the National Curriculum are covered. Our music curriculum enables all children to make good progress because it is accessible, relevant and enjoyable for all.
Kapow provides regular opportunities for assessment of children, including a performance element at the end of each unit so teachers can make a summative assessment of children’s learning and accurately track their progress and understand their next steps. We identify key concepts that we want children to learn at the start of each topic. We then revisit and revise these key concepts using a cumulative quizzing approach and a daily 5 ‘sticky’ knowledge quiz to recap prior learning.
Our aim is for children to leave Sunnybrow Primary School equipped with a range of skills to enable them to succeed in their secondary education and to be able to enjoy and appreciate music throughout their lives.
Our music curriculum is expected to impact our children in the following ways:
- Be confident performers, composers and listeners and will be able to express themselves musically at and beyond school.
- Show an appreciation and respect for a wide range of musical styles from around the world and will understand how music is influenced by the wider cultural, social and historical contexts in which it is developed.
- Understand the ways in which music can be written down to support performing and composing activities.
- Demonstrate and articulate an enthusiasm for music and be able to identify their own personal musical preferences.
- Meet the end of key stage expectations as outlined in the National Curriculum for music.
