Music

Intent

At Altofts Junior School, we believe that music should be an enjoyable learning experience. We feel it is important to provide children with a high-quality music education, which nurtures, inspires and engages children to develop a love of music and develop their talents as musicians. This, in turn, helps to increase pupils’ self- esteem and emotional well-being, creativity and sense of achievement. We also aim to inspire and nurture our children as performers providing them with opportunities to display their musical talents and recognise their achievements by allowing them to share their enjoyment with the school community.

Children develop the musical skills of singing, playing tuned and untuned instruments, improvising and composing music as well as listening and responding to music. They 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, 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.

Implementation

At Altofts Junior School, music teaching delivers the requirements of the National Curriculum through use of the Kapow Primary’s Music scheme, which takes a holistic approach to music, in which the individual strands

below are woven together to create engaging and enriching learning experiences:

Listening and evaluating
Creating sound
Notation
Improvising and composing
Performing

The units are sequenced so that skills are revisited, embedded and mastered over time. Each five-lesson unit combines these strands within a cross-curricular topic designed to capture pupils’ imagination and encourage them to explore music enthusiastically. Over the course of the scheme, children are taught how to sing fluently with expression and play tuned & untuned instruments accurately and with control. They learn to recognise, demonstrate 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.

Alongside our curriculum provision for music, children also have the opportunity to learn to play a musical instrument by participating in additional small group music teaching with peripatetic teachers organised by Wakefield Music Service. Pupils also have the opportunity to join the school choir, which takes part in the Young Voices Concert.

Impact

Children at Altofts Junior School leave Year 6 with the following experiences and understanding:

a secure knowledge of the interrelated dimensions of music
as confident performers, composers and listeners who are able to express themselves musically at and beyond school
showing an appreciation and respect for a wide range of musical styles from around the world and understand how music is influenced by the wider cultural, social, and historical contexts in which it is developed
understanding the various ways in which music can be written down to support performing and composing activities
demonstrating and articulating an enthusiasm for music and able to identify their own personal musical preferences
having high aspirations in their further study of music and, if they choose, playing an instrument of their choice.

music ltp 1 .pdf

Knowledge Organisers

Year 3

Year 4