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.

At Gorseland, our music curriculum ensures full National Curriculum coverage with an integrated, practical, exploratory and child-led approach to musical learning. 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 of the strands of musical learning which correspond with the national curriculum for music:

1. Listening and Appraising

2. Musical Activities

   • Warm-up Games

   • Optional Flexible Games

   • Singing

   • Playing instruments

   • Improvisation

   • Composition

3. Performing

Our music curriculum enables children to understand musical concepts through a repetition-based approach to learning. Learning about the same musical concept through different musical activities enables a more secure, deeper learning and mastery of musical skills. 

Lessons have been designed as a spiral curriculum. Over time, children can both develop new musical skills and concepts, and re-visit established musical skills and concepts. Mastery means both a deeper understanding of musical skills and concepts and learning something new.

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.