Music

At Neville’s Cross, we recognise Music provides our children with key skills to build their confidence and offer opportunities to shine. At Neville’s Cross we hold the Silver Award for the Arts Mark and believe Music teaching should inspire a love of music. We offer a personal journey of discovery beginning from EYFS and beyond. This is implemented by providing our children with a wide range of music embedded in the curriculum including historical music, world music, traditional music and encouraging the children to develop their own personal compositions. Our children will be provided with opportunities to appraise music, sing as part of a group, play a range of instruments, and are given the tools to evaluate and compose their own musical pieces. We use Charanga and Sing Up as the foundation of our curriculum. These schemes offer a wide range of genres and opportunities to explore music together. At Neville’s Cross our inclusive opportunities ensure that all children have a chance to express themselves as musicians. 

At Neville’s Cross our Music curriculum is designed with our key curriculum drivers in mind:  

Creativity– We aim to nurture and encourage our children’s creativity and personal expression through music. It is our intention that children find their own voice through music and use the tools provided through music lessons to inspire their own compositions. Our children will have opportunities to express themselves as individuals as well as part of a group, while exploring a wide range of genres to widen our musical experiences.  

Wellbeing – We aim to equip children with confidence to show their individuality through music. Music aims to provoke meaningful discussion and a range of emotions. During music lessons we encourage experimentation, problem solving and resilience, providing our children with vital team working skills for their future. At Neville’s Cross, we believe that music can be used as a powerful tool to promote wellbeing, health and happiness. 

Our Communities– We explore a wide range of culture, historical, traditional and world music throughout of music curriculum. Neville’s Cross children are exposed to music in key moments in world history and dive into the importance of music throughout our history. We strive to provide our children with a range of musical experiences to offer our children with an understanding of how music impacts upon ourselves and others.  

Music in the Early Years

In the Early years, music is woven into daily life. Children are taught traditional songs and rhymes, whilst also being offered opportunities for experimentation and shared musical experiences. Children are given the opportunity to experience, listen, sing and dance to music. Children demonstrate musical expression, preference and confidence when creating their own musical experiences.  

Music in Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2

Our Music curriculum aims to fully meet the aims and programme of study for the National Curriculum, through the use of Charanga and Sing Up. For our long term, plans, please refer to the document below:

Music in Key Stage 1

Music is planned to expose children to the foundations of music. Diving into beat, rhythm, pitch, tempo and dynamics. We pride ourselves in our carefully mapped out music progression to support our children’s development throughout the curriculum. Children are encouraged to use these skills to express their individuality through music and gain a sense of achievement through demonstrating these skills, whether that be through a listener or a performer. Throughout KS1 children will focus upon percussion and be introduced to following simple graphic scores, preparing children for later in their Neville’s Cross journey.  

Music in Key Stage 2

Music is planned to carefully build upon the prior knowledge and skills learnt and apply these skills to the recorder and ukulele. We pride ourselves in continuing to encourage musical expressions both in groups and as individuals, enabling our children to display their individuality and musical preferences. We pride ourselves in offering our children opportunities to develop notation, appraise various genres of music, play a range of melodies, create scores on Garage Band and share original compositions. Our Music curriculum nurtures confident, resilient and ambitious musicians.  

Learning Links

At Neville’s Cross we recognise the importance of music in wider school life in addition to the music curriculum curriculum. We pride ourselves in offering a range of additional musical opportunities such as choir and music lessons, taking children to performances both inside and outside of school. We aim to provide our children with the opportunity to gain a sense of belonging to both Neville’s Cross School and the surrounding community.   

We celebrate music through weekly singing assemblies, weaving our music into everyday opportunities and working towards Key Stage or whole school performances. At Neville’s Cross we are proud of our Key Stage and whole school productions, these bring the school together as a community and offer the opportunity to celebrate the children’s individual talents. We hope these performances will spark a love for music and an interest in pursuing music both inside and outside of school.  

Our curriculum links with key moments in our history, such as Remembrance Day. This link carefully teaches children about historical events, brings us together with each other and our community and enables children to work towards a meaningful performance.  

Impact 

Through our carefully mapped curriculum and high-quality teaching, our children will have obtained the key foundation skills of music. They will have experienced a wide range of music, percussion, wind and string instruments, key vocabulary, song writing and composition skills. When our children leave Neville’s Cross, they will have gained the skills to work both in groups and independently, while gaining the skills, confidence, creativity and resilience to express themselves as musicians.