Music

Music Intent

At Highfield, we believe that a high-quality music education should engage and inspire pupils to develop a lifelong love of music. By bringing high-quality live music & interaction into the classroom, we want children to develop key musical skills and techniques, whilst inspiring them through live performance.

Implementation

In the infants:

• We use our voices expressively and creatively by singing songs focussing on different rhythmic patterns.
• We start to introduce the children to musical concepts & terminology: pitch, duration, dynamics, tempo, timbre, texture, structure and appropriate musical notation.
• We play tuned and untuned instruments musically and learn to follow the conductor.
• We listen with concentration and musical understanding to live music.
• We experiment, create, select and combine sounds using the inter-related dimensions of music.
• We focus on teaching pupils to develop and control their musical aural memory.
• We teach the pupils to sing and play musically with increasing confidence.
• We target these areas and make sure our youngest children experience the joy of learning through exposure to live musicians.

In the juniors:

We teach children to sing and play musically with increasing confidence and control developing and building on the skills above. In addition, we develop their understanding of musical composition, manipulating ideas within musical structures and developing their aural memory skills.

• We perform in solo and ensemble contexts, using the voice and various instruments with accuracy, fluency, control and expression.
• We improvise and compose music as a team using the inter-related dimensions of music.
• We develop our aural memory skills and learn to understand staff and other musical notations.
• We reference recorded music drawn from different traditions and from great composers and musicians thus developing an understanding of the history of music.

Curriculum lessons are delivered in partnership with a specialist provider and in the juniors, we work closely with Bromley Youth Music Trust (BYMT) so that all children are given the opportunity to learn a musical instrument taught by qualified musicians.

Impact

We want to provide the opportunity for them to develop their talents as musicians, and so increase their self-confidence, creativity and sense of achievement. 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.