Music | Redlands Primary and Nursery School

Crown Street, Worksop, Nottinghamshire, S80 1TH

01909 473655

Music at Redlands

I don't sing because I am happy, I am happy because I sing - William James

We don't sing because we are happy, we are happy because we sing - Redlands Choir

Building a community of lifelong learners where everyone strives to be the best they can be - both as an individual and as part of the Redlands family - so that we can be proud of ourselves and our school.

Proud to be Redlands; Proud to be me.

We have developed an ACE curriculum at Redlands built on three main curriculum drivers.

Aspiration

Community

Experience

Aspiration within music

At Redlands we are committed to building aspirations for the future so that all children can leave Redlands with a deeper understanding of music in the world and the significance of music through history. Children are encouraged to explore their own musical preferences and discuss these with confidence.

We encourage children to take a keen interest in music by exploring their creativity by providing first hand experiences such as watching and performing theatre productions and whole school singing.

Community within music

Music helps the school community to come together by creating a sense of group identity and it promotes feelings of closeness and connection with others.

With whole-class and whole-school performances, ensemble performances, creating and listening with friends, the love of music strengthens our own community. The sheer joy of music making can feed the soul of a school community. Children share their own community feeling by performing to others, especially around Christmas by visiting local nursing homes, taking part in carol services and presenting the nativity.

Experiences within music

Children have a range of experiences and visits from nursery to Y6 to enhance their music curriculum from individual and ensemble composition and performance within classes to the Young Voices concert at Sheffield Arena! We also take part in annual events such as the Worksop Festival competition, visiting nursing homes to spread smiles, singing at the Worksop Christmas lights switch-on, performing at festival services at St. John’s Church and Redlands Got Talent.

Music plays an important role in the lives of children at Redlands.

We believe that the benefits of children accessing a broad range of musical experiences and activities is vital to their all-round educational development. Music helps to develop numeracy, languages, memorisation techniques, physical co-ordination, and an understanding of the wider world and other cultures. It also allows children to become creative thinkers, build their confidence, and develop a sense of communal pride.

Musical opportunities here at Redlands are wide and varied and include:

Whole class ukulele lessons provided by a visiting music tutor
Workshops with professional musicians such as Voces8 – the internationally renowned a Capella group
Young Voices Group - Each year the school participates in the national Young Voices festival performing with thousands of other children at Sheffield Arena. This is an experience they will never forget as they become part of a full arena stage show with live band and stars from the world of music such as Tony Hadley.
School choir - The school choir performs at a number of events through the year including entry into the Worksop Music festival
Year 6 children present an end of year performance in collaboration with Acorn Theatre
Summer Celebration and Christmas concerts - children of all ages prepare and perform at two of the key events in our school calendar

Music brings all the educational advantages mentioned above, but most significantly it brings fun and joy to the classroom. It helps our children engage with one another and the wider world and helps them to create memories that will remain with them long after they leave Redlands.

Intent

At Redlands we adopt the Kapow Primary’s Music scheme. This has been designed as a spiral curriculum with the following key principles in mind:

•Cyclical: Pupils return to the same skills and knowledge again and again during their time in primary school.

•Increasing depth: Each time a skill or area of knowledge is revisited it, is covered with greater depth.

•Prior knowledge: Upon returning to a skill, prior knowledge is utilised so pupils can build upon previous foundations, rather than starting again.

The intention of the Kapow Primary music scheme is first and foremost to help children feel that they are musical, and to develop a life-long love of music. At Redlands 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 develop the musical skills of singing, playing tuned and untuned instruments, improvising and composing music, and listening and responding to music.

They 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, the 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.

Most music units are taught using the Kapow schemes of work with some units taken from BBC ten pieces as well as whole class instrument lessons taught by the class teacher.

Implementation

Kapow Primary’s Music scheme takes a holistic approach to music, in which the individual strands below are woven together to create engaging and enriching learning experiences:

• Listening and evaluating

• Creating sound

• Notation

• Improvising and composing

• Performing

Each five-lesson unit combines these strands within a cross-curricular topic designed to capture pupils’ imagination and encourage them to explore music enthusiastically. They will learn to recognise, demonstrate and name the interrelated dimensions of music - pitch, duration, tempo, timbre, structure, texture and dynamics - and use these expressively in their own improvisations and compositions. Music is timetabled weekly at Redlands with a whole school singing assembly every Tuesday morning.

Impact

The expected impact of following the Kapow Primary Music scheme of work is that children will:

•Be confident performers, composers and listeners and will be able to express themselves musically at and beyond school

•Show an appreciation and respect for a wide range of musical styles from around the world and will understand how music is influenced by the wider cultural, social, and historical contexts in which it is developed

•Understand the various ways in which music can be written down to support performing and composing activities

•Demonstrate and articulate an enthusiasm for music and be able to identify their own personal musical preferences

•Meet the end of key stage expectations outlined in the National curriculum for Music

Learning Component Overview - Whole school

Music - knoweldge progression

Music - Key vocabulary - whole school

Young Voices

Every year groups of children from years 4, 5 and 6 travel on a noisy coach to Sheffield Arena to perform with the Young Voices band. Everyone works hard during the rehearsals and, after a picnic tea, sing out hearts out with thousands of other children from all over the country. Here are a couple of short clips from previous years.

Christmas

Christmas is always a busy time for singers and for our choir it means performing at Worksop Christmas lights switch-on, at school, at church and at a local nursing home. We love singing the Christmas songs and start practising in September!!

Redlands Primary and Nursery School

Music at Redlands

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