Music
Intent
At Blenheim, we provide opportunities for all children to create, play, perform and develop a life-long love of music. Through the Kapow Primary’s Music scheme, we introduce children to music from around the world and across generations, teaching children to respect and appreciate the music of all traditions and communities.
Children will develop the musical skills of singing, playing tuned and untuned instruments, improvising and composing music, and listening and responding to music. They will develop an understanding of the history and cultural context of the music that they listen to and learn how music can be written down. Through music, we help children develop transferable skills such as team-working, leadership, creative thinking, problem-solving, decision-making and performance skills. These skills are vital to children’s development as learners and have a wider application in their general lives outside and beyond school.
Children in Year 3 and Year 5 are also provided with the opportunity to take part in whole-class instrumental teaching provided by ArtForms Leeds.
Implementation
We follow Kapow Primary’s Music scheme, which takes a holistic approach to music, in which the individual strands below are woven together to create engaging and enriching learning experiences:
- Performing
- Listening
- Composing
- The history of music
- The inter-related dimensions of music
Every year group is taught music each half term, with year 3 and 5 receiving whole-class instrumental tuition for half of the year. In the Kapow scheme, each five-lesson unit combines the strands above within a cross-curricular topic designed to capture pupils’ imagination and encourage them to explore music enthusiastically. Over the course of the scheme, 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.
The Kapow Primary scheme follows the 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, as well as the interrelated dimensions of music and more.
In each lesson, 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.
Differentiated guidance is available for every lesson to ensure that lessons can be accessed by all pupils and opportunities to stretch pupils’ learning are available when required.
The long term plan for our school is linked below:-