Music

Music at Gorseland aims to bring joy to all. We hope to inspire creativity and self expression and for children to foster a lifelong love of music. Our curriculum aims to build the skills, knowledge and understanding to become effective listeners as well as confident composers and performers. We want to give all children the opportunity to listen and respond to a broad range of musical styles and genres, from all around the world and different times. We want children to have the opportunity to take their musical learning and enjoyment further by offering musical clubs, and we hope that they will be inspired to continue on their musical journey long after leaving Gorseland. We have a large range of musical instruments which we aim for all children to access throughout their time here. 

We believe that being creative contributes to the overall well-being and happiness of our children so we aim to include musical elements in many other areas of our curriculum, such as music played in assembly or a song learnt in a French lesson. 

Through collaborative music making, children enjoy working together to achieve something special, something that belongs to them and something they can feel a deep sense of pride in.

Our music lessons are designed with a holistic approach, where key strands of music education are interwoven to provide children with dynamic and enriching learning experiences:

• Listening and Evaluating

• Creating Sound

• Notation

• Improvising and Composing

• Performing

Each unit blends these elements to captivate children's imaginations and inspire a deep enthusiasm for music. Opportunities for developing vocal techniques and playing both tuned and untuned instruments with precision are embedded throughout. Students are introduced to the interrelated dimensions of music—pitch, tempo, timbre, structure, texture, and dynamics—and are encouraged to use these elements expressively in their own improvisations and compositions.

Our curriculum follows a spiral model, allowing pupils to revisit and build upon previously learned skills and knowledge. As they progress through each stage, they are continually challenged, refining their abilities. Children deepen their understanding of music history, staff notation, and the connections between the fundamental elements of music. 

The expected impact of our music curriculum is that children will be able to:

• use their voices expressively and creatively by singing songs and speaking chants and rhymes  

• play tuned and untuned instruments musically  

• listen with concentration and understanding to a range of high-quality live and recorded music  

• experiment with, create, select and combine sounds using the inter-related dimensions of music.

• play and perform in solo and ensemble contexts, using their voices and playing musical instruments with increasing accuracy, fluency, control and expression

• improvise and compose music for a range of purposes using the inter-related dimensions of music  

• listen with attention to detail and recall sounds with increasing aural memory  

• use and understand staff and other musical notations  

• appreciate and understand a wide range of high-quality live and recorded music drawn from different traditions and from great composers and musicians  

• develop an understanding of the history of music.

Children complete quizzes at the end of the majority of lesson which assess the key knowledge from that lesson as well as prior knowledge from previous lessons. Teachers use the information gathered from these quizzes to address misconceptions and move the children's learning on. At the end of each unit, children complete a quiz which assesses the key knowledge from the whole unit. The children's quiz scores are used alongside teachers' observations of specific music skills to form a termly judgment as to whether each child has met, exceeded or is working towards the expected standard in Music.

Subject leaders monitor teaching and learning in their subject through observing teaching and learning in lessons, analysing the work produced by children, talking to samples of children in different year groups about what they know and remember from their learning and termly data analysis to track the progress of learning in their subject across the school.