Music

Headlands Primary School | Music Narrative 

Music is a universal language. A quality music curriculum will engage and inspire pupils to develop a love of music and their talent as musicians. The curriculum will enable children to perform, listen to, review and evaluate music across a range of historical periods, genres, styles and traditions, including the work of the great composers and musicians.

Each year children will study an influential composer, their life and works (Y1 Ludwig van Beethoven, Y2 John Williams, Y3 Jean Sibelius, Y4 Antonio Vivaldi, Y5 Edward Elgar, Y6 Grazyna Bacewicz) whilst listening to, reviewing and evaluating music across a range of historical periods, genres, styles and traditions. They will be taught to appreciate and understand a wide range of high-quality live and recorded music drawn from great composers and musicians and different traditions round the world, thereby developing an understanding of the history of music. These musicians will include composers such as Scott Joplin, Hans Zimmer and Anna Meredith, singers such as Frank Sinatra, Freddie Mercury and Etta James and instrumentalists such as Glenn Miller, Jake Shimabukuro, Ravi Shankar and Jess Gillam. 

Children will understand and explore how music is created, produced and communicated, including through the inter-related dimensions which will form the ‘big ideas’: pitch, duration, dynamics, tempo, timbre, texture, structure and appropriate musical notations. Teachers will make explicit reference to where children have met these concepts before in the curriculum.

Every child will learn to use their voice and sing, compose music on their own and with others and have the opportunity to play several musical instruments and progress to the next level of musical excellence.

All children from Years 1-6 have the opportunity to engage in extracurricular music, including choirs and other instrumental groups.

Children will be taught to sing weekly in Reception and Key Stage 1 in a singing session. At Key Stage 2, children will be taught singing in year groups. Children will be taught music once every two weeks.

Whilst in Key Stage 1 children will be taught to use their voices expressively and creatively. They will be taught to play tuned and untuned instruments musically, including whole class ocarinas in Year 2. They will listen with concentration and understanding to a range of high-quality live and recorded music and experiment with, create, select and combine sounds using the inter-related dimensions of music.

In Key Stage 2 Children will be taught to sing and play musically with increasing confidence and control and will have the opportunity to play other musical instruments. They can have peripatetic lessons from a specialist teacher on a range of instruments. The children will receive whole class ukuleles in Year 3 and recorders in Year 4. They will also have a First Access percussion project delivered by NMPAT in Year 4. They will have opportunities to play and perform in solo and ensemble contexts, using their voices and playing musical instruments with increasing accuracy, fluency, control and expression. They will develop an understanding of musical composition, organising and manipulating ideas within musical structures and reproducing sounds from aural memory. They will improvise and compose music for a range of purposes using the inter-related dimensions of music, listen with attention to detail and recall sounds with increasing aural memory, use and understand staff and other musical notations. In Years 5 and 6 children will learn a range of songs for Young Voices and have the opportunity to perform in one of the largest choir concerts in the world to further enhance their knowledge of musical participation and performance.

Subject Documents