Music

'There is music in every child; the teacher's job is to find and nurture it.'

Francis Clark

At Chandos, we aim to provide every child with high quality, musical experiences that engage and inspire them through a curriculum providing opportunities for all children to create, play, perform and enjoy music as well as time to appreciate a variety of music styles. We aim for every child to leave Chandos Primary School with a range of musical skills, knowledge with an understanding and love of music, which they can carry with them for the rest of their lives.

Every child, regardless of gender, race or ability will have equal access to the Music Curriculum. We aim to provide for all children so that they can achieve their best according to their individual needs, whether they need additional support or more challenge.

Curriculum Intent

At Chandos, we:

create successful, effective learners who understand and value scholarship and education
create competent, critical thinkers who can challenge and develop ideas
create effective communicators of our shared beliefs, values and learning
create tolerant and respectful global citizens who have an understanding and knowledge of our local, national and global communities

Curriculum Implementation

At Chandos, we teach try to weave our music curriculum into our core themes and experiences whenever possible but most of our Music teaching is taught by using the Charanga Music Scheme. As well as this, we also have specialist musical provision from outside of school brought in to teach specific musical instruments in Year 4. At the end of the year, children and their parents can elect to continue with their instrument teaching in Years 5 and 6. The instruments we have on offer are ukeles and string (cello/violin). We also offer a steel pan club to Year 5 and 6.

We encourage our children to pariticpate in a variety of musical experiences such as listening and responding to music, composing short pieces of their own or working with real-life musicians where they learn how to read musical notation - both graphically and symbollically - and follow this to play a piece of music. Children are taught to make music together with tuned and untuned instruments and to compose pieces for themselves. They are also taught to sing and play in time, controlling the sound and pace. These experiences have helped our children build up their confidence and ability to express themselves.

Singing is an integral part of our school life with learning, performing arts clubs and assemblies incorporating songs at every opportunity. Our singing teaching focuses on developing our pupils' ability to sing in tune, develop expression and allow for the opportunity to listen to others. We also have a Key Stage Two choir that all children are encourage to audition for.

We want to empower our children to be as creative as they possibly can be and pride ourselves on creating opportunities for children to express themselves musically, and to experience a variety of musical experiences. These experiences may be school-wide such as our annual trip to St Alban's Church at Christmas time to sing carols or for specific year group projects such as the 'Messiah Educational Project' where children learn to sing songs to perform within the community.

Early Years

The Early Years Curriculum ensures that Music is taught through ‘Expressive Art & Design’.

Throughout their time in Early Years, children are given the opportunity to explore different musical instruments and to express themselves musically. Songs and chants are an intergrated part of our learning journey for core skills such as coutning.

By singing, chanting and playing percussion instruments at an early age, children not only begin to learn and develop their musical skills but all their gross motor skills too.

KS1 and KS2 Yearly Overviews

The Charanga scheme of learning forms the foundation of our music currciulum as it follows an integrated, practical, exploratory and child led approach to teaching music.

All learning is based on one of three areas:

Listening and Appraising
Musical Activities
Singing and Performing

All three of these areas incorporate the main areas of music: pulse, rhythm, pitch, tempo, dynamics, timbre, texture, structure and notation.

Music Skills To Be Developed

At Chandos, all children will be given the opportunity to develop their musical skills.

They are as follows:

Children will perform, listen to, review and evaluate music across time periods, styles. They will also have the opportunity to hear the work of great composers and muscisians.