Our curriculum: Music
At The Mead, music is taught from Nursery to Year 6, with each lesson lasting 45 minutes-1 hour, once per week. Whilst our specialist Music Teacher is on maternity leave, music is being taught by a cover teacher.
In Early Years, music lessons consist of singing and clapping games to provide opportunity for understanding rhythm. For Years 1-6, we currently use the Charanga Musical School Original Scheme, which provides week-by-week lessons for each year group. Each Unit of Work comprises of the stands of musical learning which correspond with the national curriculum for music: Listening and Appraising, Singing, Improvising, Composing and Performing.
We follow a differentiated, spiral approach to learning. As stated by Charanga, ‘Within each unit of learning, students revisit existing knowledge and skills and then build upon and extend them incrementally. In this manner, learning is consolidated and augmented, allowing for increasing musical confidence, while constantly being gently challenged to go further.’
The Charanga units ensure that children are exposed to music across a range of historical periods, styles and traditions. Our ‘Musician of the Month’ display also promotes our pupils’ awareness and curiosity in this area.
Children have a range of resources to use in lessons, including untuned and tuned percussion and tablets/laptops. Where appropriate, we will make use of software such as Charanga Yumu, Garage Band and Chrome Music Lab to explore and record musical ideas.
Children are also provided with the opportunity to learn to play a tuned instrument: recorder in Year 3 and Ukulele in Year 4.
We ensure that our music lessons are inclusive. To support pupils with SEND, teachers use a range of accessible activities and resources, including the use of ICT software to enable pupils to create compositions rather than relying on handwritten notation, pastel backgrounds on slides to support dyslexic pupils, visual prompts and appropriate groupings to reduce noise level.
Regarding assessment, we use a variety of methods of formative assessment, and also record performances each term to observe progress.
The Mead collaborates with Wiltshire Music Connect, who leads the Wiltshire music education hub to ‘connect children and young people in our county with a broad range of music making opportunities and experiences’. Wiltshire Music Connect also offers staff training days/workshops and Cluster Music meetings.