At Woodlands Park Primary School, we believe that Music is a vital part of children’s education, with a significant and valuable role in the taught curriculum as creativity has formed one of the curriculum drivers.

The Music curriculum aims to develop children’s understanding of music through an active involvement in performing, composing, listening and appraising. The curriculum is based on the principle that it should be fun and engaging for all concerned so that pupils can develop a love and appreciation for music. A high-quality music education aims to engage and inspire pupils to develop a love of music and foster their talent as musicians, and in doing so, will increase their self-confidence, critical skills, ability to listen, creativity and a sense of personal achievement.

Every child is a born musician, and music plays a role in every aspect of our lives – wherever and whoever we are. These beliefs lie at the heart of our music curriculum.

Implementation of our Music curriculum

The knowledge and skills that children will develop throughout each Music unit are mapped across each year group and are progressive throughout the school. The emphasis on skills ensures that children build an understanding of the musical elements through a variety of musical genres. This systematic approach to the development of musical elements and musical genres means that children are given opportunities to express their creative imagination, as well as practise and develop their musical understanding.

The curriculum map has been carefully designed with particular thought to the order of units, following a spiral approach to musical learning, with children revisiting, building and extending their knowledge and skills incrementally. Units build upon each other, developing knowledge, both substantive and disciplinary, vocabulary and skills. The music elements (pitch, duration, dynamics, tempo, timbre, texture, structure and appropriate musical notations) are revisited and built upon to ensure long term retention.

The units of work are aligned with the National Curriculum for Music. The majority of the units are from the Charanga scheme of work. Each lesson contains a song around which the musical learning is centred around ensuring that the musicianship skills of listening, singing, performing, composing and improvising are revisited and developed all the time.

Impact of our Music curriculum

The structure of the Music curriculum ensures that children are able to develop their knowledge and understanding of how a piece is musically constructed, paying attention to genre, timbre, tempo and dynamics. Children learn to understand and apply the key principles of the musical elements.

The Music curriculum at Woodlands Park Primary contributes to children’s personal development in creativity, independence, judgement and self-reflection.

Pupils enjoy Music and engage enthusiastically with our curriculum. This results in pupils developing a love of the subject that will continue in secondary school and beyond.

The school also celebrates children’s achievements in Music and have external music lesson opportunities available to our pupils, as well as a school choir, school orchestra, school world wide musical instrument club and we offer singing  lessons. We have a music specialist teacher and a bespoke, well-equipped music room. Singing and music is so important to us, we also have a school song which is changed on a termly basis.