Music

At Carr Head Primary School, we aim to engage, motivate and inspire pupils to develop a love of music and their talent as musicians, and so increase their self-confidence, creativity and sense of achievement.  

Music is a unique way of communicating, it is a vehicle for personal expression, and it can play an important part in personal and cognitive development.  Music at Carr Head aims to reflect the culture and society that we live in, and so the teaching and learning of music enables children to better understand the world they live in.  We recognise that music can be a highly academic and demanding subject, but we also aim to make it a creative and enjoyable activity.  Music also plays an important part in helping children to feel part of a community and so we provide opportunities for all children to create, play, perform and enjoy music both in class and to an audience through assemblies, concerts and key stage performances.  Lessons enable children to develop their skills, appreciate a wide variety of musical forms, and begin to make judgements about the quality of music.   

Music teaching at Carr Head Primary School aims to follow the requirements of the National Curriculum for Music, providing a broad, balanced and differentiated curriculum, ensuring the progressive development of musical concepts, knowledge and skills.  Our music curriculum provides an outline of core knowledge around which develops exciting and stimulating themes and lessons to promote the development of pupils’ knowledge, understanding and skills as part of the wider school curriculum. 

The National Curriculum organises the attainment targets for Music under:

• Listening and evaluating.
• Creating sound.
• Notation.
• Improvising and composing.
• Performing – singing and playing.

Accordingly, our music curriculum has been structured with these strands running through each unit.  The strands ensure balanced coverage of the different areas of music and that both substantive and disciplinary aspects are covered.

We use the KAPOW Music Scheme to support the planning and delivery of our music curriculum.  The curriculum is designed to help pupils recognise themselves as musical and to nurture a lifelong love of music.  The scheme develops the skills, knowledge, and understanding needed to become confident performers, composers, and listeners. The curriculum introduces pupils to music from across the world, encouraging respect and appreciation for the music of all traditions and communities.  Pupils build musical skills through singing, playing tuned and untuned instruments, improvising, composing and listening and responding to music. They develop an understanding of the historical and cultural context of the music they encounter and learn how music can be notated. The curriculum also supports the development of transferable skills, including teamwork, leadership, creative thinking, problem-solving, decision-making and presentation and performance abilities. These skills are integral to pupils’ development as learners and have wide application in their lives beyond school.