Music is an important part of school life at Carlton Primary School, with a wide and varied range of activities being taught and offered throughout the school.
Our aims for Music at Carlton Primary School are that:
- All children have the opportunity to perform a variety of music encompassing a diverse range of musical styles and breadth of musical content, using voices and numerous instruments, developing the key skills of playing in time; demonstrating an awareness of the different musical dimensions; performing with sensitivity, focus and concentration whilst showing an awareness of others in performing together.
- All children have the chance to explore how music is created, constructed and ordered by combining sounds together in increasingly structured and defined ways, and understanding how patterns and musical formulae combine to allow musicians to freely express and create new musical ideas through improvisation, and the focused construction of more sustained and complex pieces of music.
- All children are exposed to a wide variety of music across numerous styles and genres, and from many points in history, so as to help children understand the development of music as an art form; the implications of cultural and social forces on the music of a specific time, period or place; and the role it plays in our lives today. This will help them to reflect on how music brings enjoyment to so many people, why people like a variety of different types of music, and how important it is in daily life across the world.
We are passionate about encouraging children to be creative and expressive. To aid this, all year groups encounter a dynamic, skills-based curriculum, consisting of weekly lessons delivering the musical aspect of the National Curriculum, alongside weekly singing sessions for Key Stage 1 and 2. During Key Stage 2, all children have the opportunity to learn to play the recorder as part of their timetabled music lessons.
Primarily, we hope all children will enjoy the time they spend creating, performing, listening to and being musical; that they will develop their confidence both in their musical skills and their self-expression and character; and that they will all feel able to participate and contribute, despite the variety of levels of ability and understanding.
We have a set of end-of-year-group expectations that enable us to identify the range of these levels of ability and to enable us to encourage and support those for whom musicality is growing and developing. This also allows us to challenge and stretch those whose fluency and control of an instrument, understanding and application of musical terminology and knowledge and overall musicality demonstrates a degree of ‘mastery, which at Carlton Primary School, we understand to be working at greater depth.