Music

At Bagshot Infant School, we want our children to feel that they are musical, and to develop a life-long love of music. We focus on developing skill, knowledge and understanding that children need in order to become confident performers, composers and listeners. Our curriculum introduces children to music from all around the world and across generations, teaching children to respect and appreciate the music of all traditions and communities.

Children will develop the musical skills of singing, playing tuned and untuned instruments, improvising and composing music, and listening and responding to music. They will develop an understanding of cultural context of the music that they listen to and learn how music can be written down. Through music, our curriculum helps children develop transferable skills such as team-working, leadership, creative thinking, problem-solving, decision-making, and presentation and performance skills. These skills are vital to children’s development as learners and have a wider application on their general lives outside and beyond school.

• Performing
• Listening
• Composing
• The inter-related dimensions of music

Each unit combines these strands within a cross-curricular topic designed to capture children’s’ imagination and encourage them to explore music enthusiastically. Over the course of the scheme, children will be taught how to sing fluently and expressively, and play tuned and untuned instruments accurately and with control. They will learn to recognise and name interrelated dimensions of music – pitch, duration, tempo, timbre, structure, texture and dynamics – and use these expressively in their own improvisations and compositions.

The Kapow scheme follows the spiral curriculum model where previous knowledge and skill are returned to and built upon. Children progress in terms of tackling more complex tasks and doing more simple tasks better, as well as developing understanding and knowledge of musical notations and the interrelated dimensions of music.

Knowledge organisers for each unit support pupils building a foundation of factual knowledge by encouraging recall of key facts and vocabulary.

Differentiated guidance is provided by Kapow for every lesson to ensure that lessons can be accessed by all children and opportunities to stretch pupils’ learning is available.

Detailed lesson plans are provided by the Kapow scheme, and learning tasks are designed to enable progress to take place across the school, building on the skills from each previous year. We use this alongside our whole school ‘Music: progression of skills’ document which can be read here

Key music terminology including: pulse, rhythm, pitch, tempo, dynamics, timbre, texture, structure, notation

That music is grouped in a variety of genre which have emerged over time.

Recognise the sounds made by a variety of musical instruments

Learn the words of several songs to perform

In each lesson, children will actively participate in musical activities drawn from a range of styles and traditions, developing their musical skills and understanding of how music works. Lessons incorporate a range of teaching strategies from independent tasks, paired and group work as well as improvisation and teacher-led performances. Lessons are ‘hands-on’ and incorporate movement and dance elements, as well as making cross curricular links with other areas of learning.

We have weekly singing assemblies and children sing collectively during assembly times. We provide opportunities for the children to perform at Harvest, Christmas and end of term assemblies for their families.