Music
Music at College Town
“There is music in every child. The teacher’s job is to find it and nurture it.”
Frances Clark
At College Town, we teach children music through different genres of popular songs and classical pieces. The children are taught in blocks or across the half term, depending on what suits the year group. Our pupils get the opportunity to listen to and appraise a range of songs, discussing their preferences and justifying these with reasons. The pupils then learn to sing the song and, over the course of the unit, play musical accompaniment for it on the glockenspiels, recorders and keyboards. We have a modern Music studio, which is very well resourced with 5 brand new keyboards and a range of new musical instruments.
Pupils are taught music from Nursery all the way through to Year 6. We have a range of genres being taught, including units on ballads, rap, reggae, pop and rock. All pupils learn about rhythm, pulse, texture, pulse and timbre. Musical notation is introduced gradually across the school, starting with pictorial representations in EYFS/KS1 and moving on to standard musical notation in KS2.
In addition to this, we also have Rocksteady coming in weekly starting in January 2025 offering paid lessons in group sessions in the instruments piano, guitar, bass, drums and voice. We are very proud of our school choir, who has performed at two Junior Music Festivals at the Reading Hexagon.
Subject content
Key stage 1
Pupils should be taught to:
use their voices expressively and creatively by singing songs and speaking chants and
rhymes
play tuned and untuned instruments musically
listen with concentration and understanding to a range of high-quality live and recorded
music
experiment with, create, select and combine sounds using the inter-related dimensions
of music.
Key stage 2
Pupils should be taught to sing and play musically with increasing confidence and control.
They should develop an understanding of musical composition, organising and
manipulating ideas within musical structures and reproducing sounds from aural memory.
Pupils should be taught to:
play and perform in solo and ensemble contexts, using their voices and playing musical
instruments with increasing accuracy, fluency, control and expression
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
appreciate and understand a wide range of high-quality live and recorded music drawn
from different traditions and from great composers and musicians
develop an understanding of the history of music.
Scheme of Work: Charanga