"Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything." 

Plato 

Intent

At Our Lady Star of the sea, our curriculum is designed with the intention of helping children to feel that they are musical and to develop a life-long love of music. In order to deliver this, we follow a Primary Music scheme called Charanga. We focus on developing the skills, knowledge and understanding that children need in order to become confident performers, composers and listeners. Our curriculum introduces children to music from all around the world and across generations, teaching our pupils to respect and appreciate the music of all traditions and communities.

Our curriculum is based on three themes: Pride in our Place, Aspire and Achieve and Ignite Possibilities. Through these themes, we educate our children to take pride in the learning of a musical instrument such as the Trumpet which they learn to play in Year 4, to aspire to be the best musicians possible and achieve great things when performing in front of an audience as part of our school band. This ignites within them the possibility that they too can be a talented musician or singer. Singing is offered as an enrichment activity and also taught by Sefton Music Service to each year group per half term. 

We follow the National Curriculum for Primary Music beginning with expressive arts in EYFS. A music progression map from Y1-Y6 builds upon prior knowledge in a carefully sequenced curriculum. 

Implementation

At Our Lady Star of The Sea, our scheme takes a holistic approach to music, in which the individual strands below are woven together to create engaging and enriching learning experiences:

• Performing

• Listening

• Composing

• The history of music

• The inter-related dimensions of music

Each unit combines these strands to capture pupils’ imagination and encourage them to explore music enthusiastically. Over the course of the curriculum, children will be taught how to sing fluently and expressively, and to play both tuned and untuned instruments accurately and with control. They will learn to recognise and name the interrelated dimensions of music – pitch, duration, tempo, timbre, structure, texture and dynamics – and will use these expressively in their own compositions and improvisations.

Our Music curriculum is taught using the Great Teaching Toolkit, 2020. We endeavour to be consistent in our approach to create a supportive environment for pupils to learn through adaptive teaching techniques and Voice 21 Talk Tactics. We activate hard thinking through our thinking schools strategies and Q Matrix questioning to bring music to life an develop a real sense of how the dimensions of music are related. At Our Lady Star of The Sea, we have a consistent recipe for teaching following Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction to teach Music. 

Impact

The impact of our curriculum can be constantly monitored through both formative and summative assessment opportunities. Each lesson includes guidance to support our teaching staff in assessing pupils against the learning objectives and the end of each unit there is often a performance element where teachers can make a summative assessment of pupils’ learning. 

After the implementation of our curriculum, our pupils should leave Our Lady Star of the Sea equipped with a range of skills to enable them to succeed and thrive in their secondary education, as well as a life-long love of music and an appreciation of the arts.

The expected impact of following Charanga is that children will:

• Be confident performers, composers and listeners, able to express themselves musically at – and beyond – school.
• Show an appreciation and respect for a wide range of musical styles from around the world and will understand how music is influenced by the wider cultural, social and historical contexts in which it is developed.
• Understand the ways in which music can be written down to support performing and composing activities.
• Demonstrate and articulate a passion for music and be able to identify their own personal musical preferences.
• Meet the end of key stage expectations outlined in the national curriculum for Music.