Our Music Curriculum

We aim to provide a high quality, well-planned, sequenced and ambitious music curriculum. Music is all around us, the soundtrack to our lives. Connecting us through people and places in our ever-changing world, music is creative, collaborative, celebratory and challenging. We therefore strongly believe that having the opportunity to study and explore music is not a privilege but a vital part of our broad and ambitious curriculum, a curriculum that aims to introduce children to the delights and disciplines of music.

Through our high-quality and well-resourced music curriculum, we want to engage and inspire children to develop a love of music and their talent as musicians, increasing their self-confidence, creativity and sense of achievement. As children progress, we want them to develop a critical engagement with music, allowing them to compose, and to listen with discrimination to the best in the musical canon.

We specifically want children to know how to:

• 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. We want to help children to appreciate and understand the works of musical giants of the past. As a school that aims to teach pupils the importance of being good Global Neighbours and develop in pupils an international mindedness, developing pupils’ appreciation of musical traditions and diversity across the world is an important part of our curriculum.
• sing and to use their voices. We bring our community together through the shared endeavour of whole school singing.
• create and compose music on their own and provide them with opportunities to perform and listen to others performing.
• 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

Our Music Curriculum in Action

Class teachers teach music in Year R and Year 1. Mrs Prest is our specialist music teacher, from Hampshire Music Service. She teaches music to children in Year 2 to 6 every Monday. This includes delivery of our Listen 2 Me programme, when children in Year 3 and 4 learn to play an instrument, for example, the violin, recorder or ukulele. In addition to regular music lessons, music is actively encouraged as a natural activity that can take place at any time of the day and throughout the year.

• Singing is encouraged throughout the day
• There is a whole school singing Collective Worship every week.
• Year R and KS1 prepare their Christmas Nativity each year.
• Year 5 and 6 prepare an end of year performance. 
• Children also have access to our Drop Everything and Listen Area in Google Classroom, where we share a wide range of music. Children can access this area at home or in school. 
• Peripatetic teachers also provide violin, guitar and piano lessons to small groups and individuals on a weekly basis.

Our choir has performed at church services, Christmas lunches as well as in local care homes.