Music

Intent

At Dilton Marsh C of E Primary School, we believe that a high quality music education provides children with a firm understanding of how arts and culture can enrich their lives. Through our curriculum, we aim to help our children feel that they are musical and encourage them to develop a lifelong love of music. Musical opportunities at Dilton Marsh C of E Primary School, enable children to gain self-confidence, creativity and a sense of achievement, while experiencing music from diverse times, places and cultures. Throughout time, music has changed lives and provided a cultural identity and celebration of the diversity of our world. An appreciation of music from different times, places and cultures is vital to the world’s future prosperity, and all pupils should be taught key skills of listening, singing, playing, composing and performing. Children should be encouraged to recognise the power that music holds and develop a sense of excitement and curiosity about the differing cultures in the world around them.

Our music curriculum is designed to equip children for their future; teaching a balance of knowledge and skills which are progressive in all areas of learning.

At Dilton Marsh we are inclusive by design, celebrating the diversity within our school family and further afield.  The nurture, compassion and kindness we demonstrate is harnessed in clear routines and explicit expectations ensuring our children feel safe and develop a strong sense of belonging from the outset.

‘A place to belong and grow together’ enables pupils at Dilton Marsh to have the determination to overcome challenges they may face. This is underpinned by our 4 key values, Belong, Encourage, Endure and Serve. Our aim at Dilton Marsh CofE Primary School is to ‘grow’ individuals who are aspirational, resilient and determined and leave our school as confident individuals who will make valid contributions to our future society.

Music in our school is about developing children’s ideas and ways of working that enable them to make sense of the world in which they live through listening, singing, playing, performing and composing. The staff at Dilton Marsh C of E ensure that all children are exposed to high quality teaching and learning experiences, including live performances, which allow children to explore what music means to them.

We aim to immerse our children in specific musical vocabulary to aid their knowledge and understanding. We intend to provide all children with a broad, balance and stimulating music curriculum.

Implementation

In ensuring high standards of teaching and learning in music, we implement a curriculum that is progressive throughout the whole school.

Planning for music is a process in which all teachers are involved to ensure that the school gives full coverage of, ‘The National Curriculum programmes of study for Music 2021’ and, ‘Expressive Arts and Design’ in the Early Years Foundation Stage. Music teaching at Dilton Marsh C of E Primary School involves adapting and extending the curriculum to match all pupils’ needs. We aim to stretch and challenge the most able and develop the independence and confidence for the less able learners too all meet their full potential and beyond.

Music is taught weekly to ensure coverage and depth to a specific area. Each year group accesses a block of music each term and is fully immersed in the concept for the duration of that block. We ensure progression between our year groups by focussing on what has been previously taught and focussing on what the children are working towards through a carefully planned progressive curriculum. Where possible, teachers plan to suit their children’s interests, current events and teaching style and we endeavour to continuously develop our resources to provide the best quality.

We ensure that all children are provided with rich learning experiences that encourage children to:

• Sing expressively and with confidence
• Play tuned and untuned instruments
• Improvise and compose their own music
• Listen and respond to music from different times, cultures and traditions
• Use musical notation as appropriate to their key stage
• Perform regularly in worships, concerts and special events
• Be open-minded and develop resilience and perseverance through self-assessment
• Develop their use of musical language, recording and techniques
• Develop their use of computing in investigating and recording.
• Make links between music and other subjects

At Dilton Marsh C of E Primary School, we aspire to promote children’s independence and for all children to take responsibility in their own learning, therefore we have implemented pre-learning and post-learning tasks for an area to show clear progression and demonstrate children’s new found knowledge and understanding. Throughout the year, we ensure that children conduct a variety of investigations to develop their language and understanding of the concepts taught.

Impact

The impact and measure of this is to ensure children not only acquire the appropriate age related knowledge linked to the science curriculum, but also skills which equip them to progress from their starting points, and within their everyday lives.All children will have:

• A wider variety of skills linked to both scientific knowledge and understanding, and scientific enquiry/investigative skills.
• A richer vocabulary which will enable to articulate their understanding of taught concepts.
• High aspirations, which will see them through to further study, work and a successful adult life.
• A curiosity for the world around them which will enable them to be inquisitive and question new concepts which come their way.