Intent

Music teaching at St Teresa’s Catholic Primary  follows the specifications of the

National Curriculum; providing a broad, balanced and differentiated curriculum and ensuring the progressive development of musical concepts, knowledge and skills. 

We believe that music plays an integral role in helping children to feel part of a community; therefore, we provide opportunities for all children to create, play, perform and enjoy music both in class and to an audience. Through assemblies and key stage performances, children showcase their learning and their understanding of performance with awareness of others.  

Lessons enable children to develop their skills, appreciate a wide variety of music and begin to appraise a range of musical genres.

The aims of our Music curriculum are to develop pupils who:

• Enjoy and have an appreciation for music.
• Listen to, review and evaluate music across a range of historical periods, genres, cultures, styles and traditions.

• Can sing and use their voices to create different effects.
• Create and compose music, both on their own and with others.
• Use a range of musical language.
• Make judgements and express personal preferences about the quality and style of music.
• Take part in performances with an awareness of audience.

Implementation

Music teaching at St Teresa’s delivers the requirements of the National Curriculum through use of the Charanga scheme of work as our core offering.  Teachers follow the suggested scheme of work, although adaptations can be made using the ‘freestyle’ element of the package to substitute units deemed to be more appropriate for thematic learning in other curriculum areas.

Music lessons are broken down into termly units and an emphasis is placed on musical vocabulary, allowing children to talk about pieces of music using the correct terminology. The  Charanga music scheme of work is supplemented by other topical schemes such as BBC Teach which has links to particular topics taught across both key stages.

Each unit of work has an on-going musical learning focus and lessons usually follow a specific learning sequence:

• Listen and Appraise
• Musical Activities (including pulse and rhythm)
• Singing and Voice
• Playing instruments
• Improvisation / Composition
• Perform and Share

All children are given the opportunity to use instruments including small percussion, keyboards, drums and glockenspiels.

In particular:

• Year 4 children are taught to play the recorder with the use of the Charanga and Rainbow Recorder scheme
• Year 2 and Year 6 are taught African drumming which is also part of the Charanga scheme and links nicely to their Africa topics.
• Years 3 and 5 are taught how to keep the beat using the Glockenspiel
• Year 6 are taught basic keyboard skills
• EYFS and KS1 use a range of percussion instruments to teach them the basic skills of beat, pulse and rhythm.

All children have regular opportunities to demonstrate their singing skills at Mass and other religious services in the church or school.  KS2 have the opportunity to participate in the Choir which is run at lunch times at varied points of the year.  This is usually in the lead up to Christmas with the Choir performing at public events and also in the summer term with a performance at the Summer Fete.  Year 6 have also taken part in a Music workshop with the Royal Shakespeare company over the past few years.  Extra-curricular music provision was negatively impacted by Covid due to the requirement to work in bubbles but we are now implementing former provision such as KS2 choir, with the expectation of returning to our fuller timetable of clubs in the 2022-2023 academic year.

Impact

Our music Curriculum is planned to demonstrate progression and build on and embed current skills. We focus on progression of knowledge and skills in the different musical components and teaching of vocabulary also forms part of the units of work. If children are achieving the knowledge and skills in lessons, then they are deemed to be making good or better progress.

• Currently, teachers assess whether children are able to perform the skills outlined in our progression of skills document, when making judgements as to whether children have achieved the expected outcomes for each year of work.
• Within lessons children are given the opportunity to build and demonstrate those skills individually and in context whether that be in lessons or performances.
• Children are encouraged to improve their personal performance and achieve their personal best.
• Pupil Voice evidences that all classes speak positively about music.  We will focus next year on improving the composition element which they have cited as a area of improvement.