Music

Music at Cam Woodfield Junior School

Intent

Our Music curriculum is designed so that children develop their understanding of what music is. We enable them demonstrate their emerging skills through listening, singing, playing, evaluating, analysing, and composing across a wide variety of historical periods, styles, traditions, and musical genres. We encourage children to focus on the work of great musicians for inspiration and exploration, and to build up a repertoire of techniques and approaches that they can apply in their own compositions. Throughout the teaching and learning of music, we spend time on the retrieval of knowledge from prior learning before accumulating more sticky knowledge.

At Cam Woodfield Junior School, we believe all children have the right to share in the music of their own and other cultures as part of a broad and balanced curriculum that raises their awareness of the world around them. It is our aim to develop children’s curiosity for the subject by exploring that the elements of music create moods and feelings, as well as their understanding and acceptance of the importance of all types of music, with an unbiased respect for the role that music may be expressed in any person’s life. We are committed to ensuring children understand the value and importance of music in the wider community, and are able to use their musical skills, knowledge, and experiences to involve themselves in music, in a variety of different contexts.

 Implementation

The Music curriculum at Cam Woodfield Junior School ensures children sing, listen, play, perform and evaluate. This is embedded in the classroom activities as well as the weekly singing assemblies, school orchestra, class assemblies, whole school performances and the learning of instruments. Teachers are required to use the curriculum overview objectives to form their planning and across the school, Music is taught either consistently every week or as a block, per theme and where possible, links are made to these year group themes. Teachers will use appropriate differentiation within Music lessons to enable all our children to access the Music curriculum. Assessment opportunities will be identified in each unit of work in order to track progress. The teacher will informally assess throughout any creation or rehearsal process, giving oral feedback, and instant methods of ways to improve. Children are also assessed when performing and are encouraged to make judgements about how they may improve their own work. 

In the classroom, children learn how to play a range of instruments. The elements of music are taught in lessons so that children are able to use the language of music and understand how it is made, played, appreciated and analysed. Through these experiences, we aim to increase their understanding of how to create notes with different instruments, as well as how to read basic music notation. They also learn how to compose focussing on different dimensions of music, which in turn informs their understanding when listening, playing, or analysing music. Children will also have opportunities to use ICT equipment during their music lessons such as recording devices, software, Apps and computers. External providers further support the implementation of the school’s policy through individual and small group music lessons with a range of instruments.

Impact

Music teaching at Cam Woodfield Junior School is planned carefully to effectively demonstrate progression in learning and help children develop their listening, singing, playing, evaluating, analysing, and composing skills. We assess and monitor the children’s understanding through our school online data system, Insight. Within our school, we use teacher judgements to record our assessments of a child’s understanding in Music.

 The impact of Music at Cam Woodfield Junior School is to ensure children have access to a varied programme, which allows students to discover areas of strength, as well as areas they might like to improve upon.  

 It is our aim that the Music curriculum will:

•        Give all children the opportunity to gain personal skills including self-confidence, self-esteem, self-motivation and personal satisfaction whilst participating in musical activities.
•        Enable children to extend their musical experience and understanding through the experience of a wide range of musical styles and traditions.
•        Develop and extend children’s musical skills involved in performing, composing, listening and appraising.
•        Enable all our children to realise their individual creative potential and to express themselves through music.
•        Enable children to develop social skills such as co-operation and respect for each other's work through making music together.

We will measure the impact of the Music curriculum by:

•         Analysing the objectives achieved and the percentage of children achieving ARE within their year group
•         Reviewing planning to ensure all opportunities for planning linked to themes are being utilised.
•   Pupil discussions and conferencing about their learning and Music within the school
•   Tracking and analysis of end of unit assessment tests