Intent

At Summercroft, we have designed our music curriculum with the intent that our children will develop a love of music and as musicians increase their self-confidence, creativity and sense of achievement. We promote Summercroft learning powers and mental well-being through high-quality music lessons and other musically diverse opportunities.  As our pupils progress they will develop a critical engagement with music, compose and listen with discrimination.

 By the end of Key Stage 1 pupils should achieve this love and successful musicality by:

• Using voices expressively and creatively.  
• Playing tuned and untuned instruments musically.
• Listening with understanding to a range of high-quality live and recorded music.
• Experimenting, creating, selecting and combining sounds using the interrelated dimensions of music (pitch, duration, dynamics, tempo, timbre, texture, structure and notation).

By the end of Key Stage 2 pupils should achieve this love of music by:

• Playing and performing in solo and ensemble using voices and playing musical instruments.
• Improvising and composing music using the interrelated dimensions of music.
• Listening and recalling sounds with increasing aural memory.
• Appreciating a wide range of live and recorded music from different traditions and from great composers and musicians.
• Developing an understanding of the history of music.

Implementation

At Summercroft, the National Curriculum objectives are taught through Music Express scheme which provides high quality and engaging lessons with clear, scaffolded progression built in from Early Years to Year 6. The scheme provides a consistent approach to the teaching of music at Summercroft and learning is sequential and incremental. The framework of spiral learning has year plans, unit plans, lesson plans and assessment sheets to support specialist and non- specialist teachers. It is topic based, cross-curricular, musically diverse, fully resourced and accessible to non-music readers. It includes varied musical styles and genres from different times and places across the globe. Each lesson has activities broken down into multiple steps, supported with audio or video activities. At Summercroft we use Music Express flexibly. We order the units to match, where possible, year group topics, Science or CLPE books. We also include opportunities to place music at the heart of our community and take opportunity to develop pupils’ musicality within the wider context of celebrations and collaboration throughout the year.