Music

On this page, you will find information on the Music Curriculum and how it is taught at Mudeford Junior School.
 

Intent Statement

 

Through nurturing children’s love of music and sparking their curiosity, the music curriculum at Mudeford Junior School develops the musician in every child. The carefully designed and progressively sequenced curriculum, enables every child to acquire the knowledge and skills that will give them the confidence to creatively manipulate musical ideas and structures for a variety of purposes.

 

As the children progress through the curriculum, their control and confidence in using a range of instruments from voice to glockenspiels, to djembes to Samba band, improves and equips them to tackle the broader skills of composing and improvising. These skills empower the children to explore and be creative with music, independently and through collaboration with others.

 

The children have the opportunity to listen to and evaluate critically, a wide-range of music, that encompasses the great composers from history, as well as the music from modern culture. We provide experiences: live performances, visits to and from local musicians like the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, which broaden the children’s perceptions and open their minds to music of the local and wider world, ensuring the curriculum is challenging and thought-provoking through engaging the children with range of instruments, Global Week, and Community Cohesion Week.

 

Children leave our school with the confidence to express their individual creativity through the skills of composing, improvising, listening, singing, performing and playing. Their awareness of musicians, instruments and composers ensures that they are able to create and appreciate their own music and all music they encounter; skills that will stay with them for life.

 

What Music Looks Like at Mudeford Junior School

 

Our children have opportunities to listen to, compose and perform their own music throughout each year. They will also learn to play a variety of instruments from glockenspiels to Samba band instruments which provides them with many of the tools for life-long music appreciation.
 
Every child has a weekly Music lesson, which currently takes place either in their classrooms or in the school's Music Room; something we are very fortunate to enjoy. These lessons are taught by the school's music and languages teacher. In their lessons, our children will participate in a variety of musical activities, including playing a range of tuned and untuned instruments, improvising, composing and listening. They will develop their skill of actively listening to a wide range of music genres with a critical ear, being able to pinpoint specific musical elements. Singing takes place in a whole school setting and in a focussed Year 3-4 setting.
 
Lessons are carefully planned, incorporating the new National Curriculum, Model Music Curriculum and adapted to suit all pupils’ needs to ensure that every child receives a fun, interesting and creative music education. The lessons are designed to be challenging, thought-provoking, and foster in the children the beginnings of an interest and curiosity in Music that grows with them throughout their lives.
 
All children have the opportunity to learn a variety of instruments in small or one-to-one lessons outside of their timetabled music lessons, taught by peripatetic teachers. These are: clarinet (Year 6); guitar; piano and violin. We also have Rocksteady ensemble lessons available for years 4-5. 
 
ICT is used throughout the children’s Music curriculum, by them and for them, through, for example, using a wide range of useful video and audio clips, software programmes like Garageband and Charanga, and for self- and teacher- assessments. There are a number of fun, educational and useful websites that the children will use in class and are able to use at home to further develop their musical education, like the groovy Incredibox. Weblinks will be added to this page, as and when they are included in school lessons.

Year 5 Hip Hop Compositions

Year 5 have been working very hard on their composition skills. They have listened to a wide range of different music within this genre to guide their work. They have combined complex rhythms in a multi-layer composition, making use of chords, harmony and sampling. Here are some examples of their work.

Singing

The school normally enjoys a rich and varied singing culture in addition to the weekly music lesson. Here are some examples of the wonderful standards achieved by the children. We are very proud!

Year 5 Singing Example

In years 5 and 6, we develop our singing skills further focussing on being able to sing in harmony and maintaining an independent part. We worked really hard to learn the song 'Stereo Hearts' by Benjamin Levin , Ammar Malik , Brandon Lowry , Daniel Omelio , Adam Levine , Disashi Lumumba-Kasongo , Matthew McGinley , Travis McCoy and Eric Roberts. We split off into groups so that we could learn the: rap section, bass line, 'ooos' and main tune, then we put it all back together. Wow! They sound great - one very proud music teacher!

In our singing lessons, the Year 6s have been working hard on the song 'Feel the Light' (words and music by Kiesa Rae Ellestad , Mikkel Eriksen , Emile Haynie and Tor Erik Hermansen).
Special well done to the solo group! Really proud of everyone for doing such a great job :)

Extra information...

Great websites! Have fun with Music!