Music

Curriculum Statement and Implementation

At St Mary’s, while using our curriculum drivers as a focus, the key objective is to develop a curiosity for the subject, as well as an understanding and acceptance of the validity and importance of all types of music, and an unbiased respect for the role that music may wish to 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.

We want music to inspire self-confidence in our children through development of a fun and safe learning environment, and encourage a feeling of fellowship through shared creation and appreciation of music.

The music curriculum ensures students sing, listen, play, perform and evaluate. This is embedded in the classroom activities as well as the weekly hymn practices, collective worship, various concerts and performances (both in and out of school), and the option to learn instruments.

Classroom music is taught using the online scheme ‘Charanga’ as a foundation, but enhanced to ensure that the learning is able to support our wider curriculum thematically.

Wolverhampton Music Service (WMS) are employed to provide high-quality, expert tuition for our instrumental learners across a wide range of instruments. WMS provide the instruments used in these lessons. We provide teaching space and arrange for children to be selected and auditioned by the WMS staff. In addition, children are able to participate in learning contemporary instruments with Rocksteady, another of our partner organisations.

Every child is given the opportunity to perform to each other in class, but also to members of the wider community and their families.

The elements of music are taught in the classroom lessons so that children are able to use some of the language of music to dissect it, and understand how it is made, played, appreciated and analysed. In the classroom students learn about the sounds that instruments make, from all four main instrument groups of wind, strings, percussion and keyboards. In doing so, they become familiar with the method of creating notes, as well as how to read basic music notation.

We assess the impact of the way children are able to enjoy music, in as many ways as they choose- either as listener, creator or performer:

They can dissect music and comprehend its parts
They can sing and feel a pulse
• They enjoy the feeling of togetherness created by singing together
• They have an understanding of how to further develop skills less known to them, should they ever develop an interest in their lives.
• They are aware of how music can be an integral part of other school themes, such as mindfulness, growth mind-set and British values
• The enhanced positivity that music can promote may be seen in other subjects in the wider curriculum.

Once children become proficient in the basic skills of their instruments, as taught by WMS, they are able to be integrated into our orchestra to gain the valuable skills of ensemble playing. Those who enjoy singing are able to join our choir in KS2, in order to explore singing and performing in greater depth.