Subject Leader - Mrs Cartwright

Intent

We aim to provide essential opportunities for all our children to create, play, and enjoy music, drama, dance and PE. We want pupils to experience games, dance, gymnastics and athletics both with the class teacher and professional sports coaches and music specialists.

We strive for pupils to receive a wide range of inspirational opportunities to promote the fun that music, dance, drama, sport and being healthy can bring.

Implementation

• Music is taught across each year group in units using Charanga musical school, that enable pupils to study in depth the key skills, understanding and vocabulary.
•  Each unit aims to activate and build on prior learning, to ensure better cognition and retention. Each unit is carefully sequenced to allow for prior learning to be built upon and skills to be practised and advanced.
• The Charanga Musical School Scheme provides teachers with week-by-week lesson support for each year group in the school. It is ideal for specialist and non-specialist teachers and provides lesson plans, assessment, clear progression, and engaging and exciting whiteboard resources to support every lesson.
• Charanga is a scheme of work which offers a topic-based approach to support children’s learning in music. A steady progression plan has been built into Charanga, both within each year and from one year to the next, ensuring consistent musical development.
• Charanga includes many examples of musical styles and genres from different eras and places around the world. These are explored through the language of music, through active listening, performing and composition activities, which enable further understanding of contexts and genres.
• Charanga provides a classroom-based, participatory and inclusive approach to music learning. Throughout the scheme, children are actively involved in using and developing their voices, body percussion, whole-body actions and learning how to correctly handle and play classroom
• , composing, and many other workshops and recorded webinars. instruments effectively to create and express their own and others’ musical preferences.
•  The Scheme supports all the requirements of the national curriculum. In line with the curriculum for music and guidance from Ofsted, this Scheme moves away from the previous levels and learning objective/outcome concepts to an integrated, practical, exploratory and child-led approach to musical learning. Ofsted have stated that “We will not always know the learning outcomes” so segregated learning objectives at the start of each lesson are not appropriate. Instead the interrelated dimensions of music weave through the units to encourage the development of musical skills as the learning progresses through listening and appraising, differing musical activities (including creating and exploring) and performing.
• Each Unit of Work comprises the of strands of musical learning which correspond with the national curriculum for music combining a range of musical activities and games. • Listening and Appraising • Singing • Playing instruments • Improvisation • Composition • Performing. All lessons enable pupils to explore their own response to music.
• Pupils are encouraged to discuss and share their ideas using the key music vocabulary, for example how the composer has used dynamics and tempo to create mood or atmosphere and it’s effect on the listener/audience.
• We also widen our children’s exposure to a range of musical skills and experiences through whole school music days, county music ukulele lessons, Rock Steady and participation in Rugby schools choir festival.
• All staff have undergone CPD in the original Charanga Scheme, and have access to many Charanga webinars on improvising

Impact

At Boughton Leigh Infants, all pupils benefit from a high-quality music education which engages and inspires them to develop a love of music and their talent as musicians. It increases their self-confidence, creativity and sense of achievement. As pupils progress, they develop a growing musical vocabulary that allows them to critically engage with music.

Teaching and learning of music is a reflective process for the children as they are given the opportunities to assess themselves and their peers. The children also celebrate their success and skills with their peers and wider audiences.