Music Curriculum Intent

The intent of the music curriculum at Garden Village Primary Academy is first and foremost to help every child to feel that they are musical, and to develop a life-long love of music. We focus on developing the skills, knowledge and understanding that children need to become confident performers, composers, and listeners. Our progressive curriculum:

• Introduces our children to music from all around the world and across generations, teaching children to respect and appreciate the music of all traditions and communities.
• Enables our children to develop the musical skills of singing, playing tuned and untuned instruments, improvising and composing music, and listening and responding to music.
• Develops an understanding of the history and cultural context of the music that they listen to and learn how music can be written down.

Furthermore, through music, our curriculum helps every child to develop transferable skills such as team-working, leadership, creative thinking, problem-solving, decision-making, and presentation and performance skills. These skills are vital to our children’s development as learners and have a wider application in their general lives outside and beyond school.

The Music Curriculum at Garden Village Primary Academy enables every child to meet the end of key stage attainment targets outlined in the National curriculum and the aims of the curriculum align with those in the National Curriculum.

 

Music Curriculum Implementation

The music curriculum at Garden Village Primary Academy 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

For each year group, units of learning are divided into five lessons which combine the above strands within a cross-curricular topic designed to capture pupils’ imagination and encourage them to explore music enthusiastically.

 

Over the course of the curriculum, our children will be:

• Be taught how to sing fluently and expressively and play tuned and untuned instruments accurately and with control.
• 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.

 

Moreover, our music curriculum follows the spiral curriculum model where previous skills and knowledge are returned to and built upon. Children progress in terms of tackling more complex tasks and doing more simple tasks better, as well as developing an understanding and knowledge of the history of music, staff, and other musical notations, the interrelated dimensions of music and more.

 

Weekly lessons will enable active participation in musical activities drawn from a range of styles and traditions, developing the children’s musical skills and their understanding of how music works. Lessons will incorporate a range of teaching strategies from independent tasks, paired and group work, as well as improvisation and teacher-led performances. Lessons are ‘hands-on’ and incorporate movement and dance elements, as well as making cross-curricular links with other areas of learning.

 

Music Curriculum Impact

The expected impact of following the Music Curriculum at Garden Village Primary Academy is that 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 various 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.