Intent

Music is an important contribution to the life of our school and should be celebrated, promoted and encouraged. Music is a unique way of communicating and is a vehicle for personal expression, and it can play an important part in one’s personal development.

Implementation

A high quality music curriculum is provided throughout the school.

Teaching and Learning

Our school follows the programmes of study as set out in the National Curriculum which aims to ensure that all pupils:

• Learn through the three golden threads of: composing and improvising, performance and singing, listening and appraising.
• Perform, listen to, review and evaluate music across a range of historical periods, genres, styles and traditions.
• Learn to sing and to use their voices, to create and compose music on their own and with others, and have the opportunity to learn a musical instrument.
• Understand and explore how music is created, produced and communicated, including through the inter related dimensions: pitch, duration, dynamics, tempo, timbre, texture, structure and appropriate musical notations.
• Planning is supported by SPS skills progression, vocabulary and curriculum map documents.
• There is an expectation that music is timetabled and taught to each class (Y1-Y6) on a weekly basis.
• For children Y1-Y6, there will be a 10 minute singing assembly each week.
• We will follow Charanga as our main scheme with each year group. We supplement Charanga, to give variety, with a unit from BBC Ten Pieces, Christmas performances and a Harvest performance.
• There is an expectiation that each year group will learn a musical instrument for a term or half a term in their class music lessons.

Y1/2 – handbells

Y3/4 – recorders

Y5 – drums

Y6 – ukulele

• Performance is an integral part of music. As well as the Christmas/Harvest/class assembly performances, we encourage performances to peer groups and buddy classes.

The Early Years Foundation Stage

A great deal of research has been carried out with regards to musical activity and the brain and it is now evident that music-making, singing and dancing aids the general development and well-being of young children. Regular musical activity both child-led and adult-led can help support children’s acquisition of language and communication. It can aid their personal and social development, their physical agility, well-being, imagination and creativity. Musical activities may also help towards an understanding of maths, allowing us to make sense of our world and possibly aid literacy skills.

Extra Curricular Music

We believe that music enriches the lives of people, and so we wish to involve as many children as possible in musical activities. The KS1 choir and Musical Theatre club are established. All children in KS1 and KS2 are entitled to join extra-curricular music lessons. Currently, we have peripatetic teachers teaching woodwind, strings, keyboard and guitar. The school also works alongside iRock to provide group instrumentation lessons through a ‘band practise’ style lesson.

Impact

The children at Stratton Primary School will experience a broad variety of musical performances from different cultures, opportunities to learn a variety of instruments and develop their knowledge and skills of reading and understanding musical pieces.

Over their time at Stratton Primary School, our pupils will be given the skills, opportunities and knowledge to understand the impact that music can have on all our lives and all cultures, including the Cornish culture, and how it can play an integral role in our emotional wellbeing.