Intent
As part of our broad and balanced curriculum at Horndale, we intend to embed a rich and enjoyable Music curriculum that engages every single child to develop a love of music and expand their talent as musicians. We value the benefits music brings to our pupils such as cooperation, communication, confidence, and perseverance and recognise how vital music is to children’s development.
The national curriculum for music aims to ensure that all pupils:
- 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.
- Learn to sing and to use their voices, to create and compose music on their own and with others, have the opportunity to learn a musical instrument, use technology appropriately and have the opportunity to progress to the next level of musical excellence.
- 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.
In 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.
Implementation
At Horndale we follow the ‘Little Fingers’ programme to teach the Music curriculum in a coherent, topic based, cross curricular way to support childrens learning and ensure progression of skills from one year to the next. We are supported in teaching this by specialist teachers from Durham Music Service to ensure that we are fulfilling the aims for musical learning stated in the National Curriculum.
Curriculum Enrichment
At Horndale we are lucky enough to work with Durham Music Service whereby each term, our children are exposed to a variety of different performances, thus widening their experiences of a range of diverse genres of Music. Additionally, all children in our school are encouraged to take part in performances, such as our annual Autumn Services and Christmas Concerts as well as performing at the Community Carol Concert each year at Newton Aycliffe Leisure Centre and for the residents of our local care home. These performances incorporate singing, dancing and playing instruments.
Impact
As a result of this we hope that at Horndale our children will;
- Be confident performers both in singing and with the use of a range of simple instruments.
- Develop an understanding of Music from around the world.
- Enjoy listening to a range of Music.
- Be able to confidently discuss their thoughts and opinions about Music and their own performances.
