Music at Chennestone Primary School

Our music curriculum encourages children to immerse themselves in musical learning that engages, inspires, challenges, provokes, exhilarates and liberates.

We use Kapow Primary music scheme. The intention of this is first and foremost to help children to feel that they are musical, and to develop a life-long love of music. We focus on developing the skills, 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 the history and 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 in their general lives outside and beyond school.

Our music curriculum will:

• Provide a curriculum that engages, inspires and challenges children as well as revisiting knowledge and skills they have learnt previously.
• Equip our children with the knowledge and skills to experiment and create their own performances and music.
• Provide the knowledge, experiences and cultural capital necessary to become educated citizens and to succeed in life.
• Provide children with the opportunity to learn to play instruments.
• Encourage a love of music and a desire to learn more.

The teaching of music at Chennestone encourages children to engage through regular, structured skills and knowledge-based lessons, providing an opportunity for pupils to develop their musicality, as well as drawing on new skills. 

Music performance and composition play an integral part in developing our young musicians. Collaboratively, children develop their social skills and well-being through the sharing of ideas, skills, singing and playing instruments.

Every week, the children take part in whole school singing assemblies which are fun and engaging and teach children to sing in tune with other people while also improving their sense of melody, rhythm and recital of songs.  We also have a school choir which takes place once a week, in which the children learn a variety of songs for performance at different times of the year:  in church, at our local old people’s home or at other public venues.  

Our choir also perform at the Young Voices Concerts each year. The choir, along with up to 9,000 other young voices at Wembley Arena, rehearse and perform together, to create a vibrant collective experience that also features special guest artists.

Whole Class Ensemble Teaching

At Chennestone, there are opportunities for our children to join their very own rock and pop band through IRock school of music.  Children unleash their creativity and confidence by learning a new instrument (drums, electric guitars or  keyboards) or can choose to be the lead singer.  Each week they learn songs, arrangements and building up to playing shows and concerts in front of audiences.  

In the EYFS, children will learn to sing a range of well-known nursery rhymes and songs and move in time with the pulse. They will listen to and talk about a wide range of music, expressing their feelings and responses. Children will explore instrumental sounds in order to create their own music and will be encouraged to share and perform their musical ideas with others.

In Key Stage 1, the children will learn to use their voices to sing expressively through learning songs and chants. They will begin to develop an awareness of the different interrelated dimensions of music through listening to a range of live and recorded music, and exploring and playing tuned and untuned instruments. Children will contribute to group and class compositions and begin to record their ideas using graphic notation. Children are encouraged to share and celebrate their learning through regular performance opportunities.

In Key Stage 2, the children will further develop their knowledge and understanding of the different interrelated dimensions of music through listening to a wide range of music from different genres and identifying their characteristics. By the end of Key Stage 2, children will sing and perform a broad range of songs, observing rhythm, phrasing, accurate pitching and appropriate singing style. Music technology will be used as one way to record and share their compositional work. There will be frequent informal opportunities to perform across each unit to help prepare for performances to a wider audience.