Intent

At Great Barton Primary Academy, our music curriculum intends to inspire creativity, self-expression and appreciation of diverse musical experiences from a variety of cultures and times.  Music reflects culture and society, and the teaching and learning of music will help children to understand the world in which they live maximising the cultural capital for all our children. We provide opportunities for all children to create, play, perform and enjoy music, to develop the skills to appreciate a wide variety of musical forms, and to begin to make judgements about the quality of music. We seek to enable pupils to become positive, reflective musicians.

Implementation

At Great Barton we have created a bespoke Music curriculum using the Charanga build your own scheme. 

In Early Years we have written our own Music units of work that compliment and consolidate learning from our half termly themes. For example during our 'Into the woods' theme children learn to sing and respond to songs such as 'When Goldilocks went to the house of the bears' and 'Teddy bears picnic'. They use percussion instruments to accompany their singing of a 'Going on a bear hunt' song. 

KS1 use units of work from Charanga's Model Music Curriculum. They develop their singing and playing of untuned percussion instruments as well as playing tuned instruments with our class set of glockenspiels.

KS2 also develop their singing skills, including learning pieces in parts or with harmonies. They also have the opportunity to learn further instruments. Woodwind is introduced in Year 3 with a recorder course using our class set of recorders. Year 4 music lessons are taken by a specialist peripatetic teacher who teaches Clarinet for the whole year. There is the opportunity for children to continue Clarinet lessons in small groups in Years 5 and 6. Upper KS2 continue to have opportunities to play percussion, recorders and glockenspiels as well as being introduced to Djembe drumming for which we have a set of drums in school. 

The use of units from the Charanga Model Music Curriculum scheme ensures that all children also have opportunities to listen to and appraise a wide range of music, to develop their understanding of musical vocabulary and notation, to create their own improvised responses and to learn pieces ready for performance.

Performance

Performance is an important part of Music at Great Barton. Performances offer opportunities for enjoyment and appreciation of Music, critical responses and having the opportunity to learn and rehearse pieces to a high standard.

We operate a 'buddy' class system where 2 classes are paired together in order that they can share performances with their buddy class on occassions across the year in the classroom.

We also host a range of performances to larger audiences in school. Music performances have taken place as part of collective worship, in Nativity and school musical productions as well as for other special events. Soloists also have the opportunity to perform during Sing Praise assembly. These allow our pupils opportunities to perform in front of the whole school, to parents and to members of our local community.

We have run extra curricular recorder club and choir which have included some performances out of school.