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