Music

Our Music  curriculum is an ambitious curriculum meeting the needs of all learners and contextualised in the community we serve.

At Severnbanks School, we intend that our Music curriculum is to first and foremost encourage our students to feel that they are musical and to foster within each child a life-long love of music. We focus on developing the skills, knowledge and understanding that children need in order to become confident performers, composers, and listeners. 

At Severnbanks School, we strive to be inclusive and achieve this in music lessons by ensuring music is varied and achievable to all.  By making connections with other parts of the curriculum where possible, we aim for music to be creative and inspiring, enabling all children to develop their skills in interesting and diverse ways. To nurture our children, music should be enjoyable and a time to be yourself and to explore ways of expressing one’s identity and emotions.

Throughout their time at Severnbanks, 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, our curriculum helps children develop transferable skills such as team-working, leadership, creative thinking, problem-solving, decision-making, and presentation 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. Music curriculum promotes our value, vision and curriculum drivers

 We follow Kapow  Primary’s Music scheme of work, which enables pupils to meet the end of key stage attainment targets outlined in the national curriculum and the aims of the scheme align with those in the national curriculum.

 

The national curriculum for music aims to ensure that all pupils:

•          perform, listen to, review and evaluate music across a range of historical periods, genres, styles and traditions, including the works of the great composers and musicians
•          learn to sing and to use their voices, to create and compose music on their own and with others, have the opportunity to learn a musical instrument, use technology appropriately and have the opportunity to progress to the next level of musical excellence
•          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.

In order to meet the National Curriculum objectives, music is throughout our curriculum and takes the form of music lessons alongside cross-curricular opportunities for music, singing practice both in class and whole school, opportunities to watch and listen to live performances and alike.

Over the course of the curriculum, 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.

 We aim to ensure that our pupils are equipped with a range of skills to enable them to succeed in the next phase of their music education and for them to be able to enjoy and appreciate music throughout their lives. We aim for all our children to aspire to be musicians.

Children will:

•          Be confident performers, composers and listeners and will be able to express themselves musically at and beyond school.
•          Show an appreciation and respect for a wide range of musical styles from around the world and will understand how music is influenced by the wider cultural, social, and historical contexts in which it is developed.
•          Understand the ways in which music can be written down to support performing and composing activities.
•          Demonstrate and articulate an enthusiasm for music and be able to identify their own personal musical preferences.
•          Meet the end of key stage expectations outlined in the national curriculum for Music.

Extra-Curricular Provision

At Severnbanks we are developing our work  with our local music hub – ‘Make Music Gloucestershire’ – to ensure children receive quality music provision and education. When children reach Key Stage 2, they have opportunities to access peripatetic music tuition in a range of instruments, such as brass, guitar and drumming, which is organised through our local hub. Our staff encourage and champion children’s musical interests and there are regular opportunities for children to play and perform at school.

In addition to music lessons, there are frequent opportunities for our children to engage with and to celebrate music, both inside and outside of school. Music plays a  part of our daily assemblies at Severnbanks and it is often used as a stimulus to spark creativity and ideas in other subject areas.

Throughout the year, the school organises opportunities for children to experience live music. In the past, this has included visits to the school from Lydney Brass Band and workshops organised through Cheltenham Music Festival and Musicate.  Children in Key Stage 2 have also attended the Cheltenham Jazz festival and been a part of the Young Voices Concert in Birmingham several times too. Year groups use and perform music when delivering class assemblies and end of term productions; and parents, families and other members of the community join together for these musical celebrations. The school offers a variety of after-school music-based clubs at different times across the academic year and are often invited to perform outside of school at local events such as  markets and Christmas Light Switch-ons.

Developing the skills of Reading, Writing, Speaking and listening through Music

 

The music lessons we teach here at Severnbanks Primary School have the intention of providing a high-quality, coherent and progressive experience of the subject, with scope for cross-curricular learning. We recognise the rich vocabulary and literacy opportunities that the listening to and learning of music can provide. Within our music teaching and learning, children are encouraged to use correct musical terminology and to speak in full sentences when discussing music. They begin to learn to read notation and also have opportunities to read and to reflect on lyrics. We also understand that music can contribute to children’s emotional literacy through the discussion of how music makes them feel and by allowing students to express themselves through music.