Music
Our Music Intent
Music is a universal language that embodies one of the highest forms of creativity. As pupils progress, they should develop a critical engagement with music, allowing them to compose, and to listen with discrimination to the best in the musical canon. (The National Curriculum, 2014)
Music teaching at Greenside Primary School aims to follow the specifications of the National Curriculum as well as the guidance set out in the non-statutory Model Music Curriculum; providing a broad, balanced and ambitious curriculum for all pupils. In addition to this, our musical offer has been planned to incorporate our 5 key drivers of: creativity, independence, resilience, aspiration and community.
Our intention is that pupils enjoy the creativity and sense of achievement that comes from making music and performing to others as well as developing a secure and deep knowledge and understanding of the substantive knowledge and the musical skills necessary to succeed in the subject. Our carefully planned and thorough musical curriculum is based upon the 4 key strands of: listening and appraising, improvising and composing, performing, and using musical notation, in which the inter-related dimensions of music (pulse, rhythm, tempo, timbre, structure, texture, pitch) are revisited and built upon progressively.
It is our aim that pupils experience and are exposed to a range of music from across a wide variety of historical periods, cultures, styles, traditions, and musical genres. We believe that music plays an integral role in helping children to feel part of a community and therefore we provide opportunities for all children to create, play, perform and enjoy music both in class and to an audience, for example through singing assemblies, key stage performances, singing events with our local cluster of schools and choir performances. Pupils in Key Stage Two are also offered the opportunity to take part in small group tuition after school in instruments such as keyboard and guitar, as part of our commitment to offering extra-curricular musical opportunities to pupils.
We strongly believe that music should be utilised to enable pupils to build valuable connections across the curriculum and support long term retrieval of knowledge and as such, we make effective use of additional singing and musical learning opportunities in other subject areas such as:
- Science (for example, pupils in Year 3 and 4 take part in a Science of Sound workshop linking the scientific and musical concepts of pitch together)
- PSHE (for example singing in assemblies about Remembrance Day, kindness, diversity and using Makaton signs).
- History (pupils in Year 1 and 2, Year 3 and 4 and Year 5 and 6 sing about the Great Fire of London, Romans and Vikings as part of their respective music units).
At Greenside Primary School, we value the opportunity to work closely with musical partners to ensure we can give our pupils the best offer possible, including Leeds Artforms who provide our Year 5 whole class glockenspiel tuition, Roundhay Music who provide our small group tuition and Leeds Music Education Partnership who provide professional development opportunities for our music leader and enable us to subsidise musical workshops, events and tuition for our pupils in order that we can achieve our aim of maximum participation in musical activity for the pupils at our school.