Music

Purpose and Aims

Music is universal, cultural, and individual. NET Academy Trust believes that every pupil should have the opportunity to receive a high-quality musical training in school, regardless of attainment, or background. The aim of music education is to help pupils to achieve a personal level of understanding, appreciation, and a passion for music.  We encourage children to be creative, caring, and enthusiastic members of our school community. 

At NET, our Music curriculum aims to ensure that all pupils:

• Are engaged and inspired to have a love of music embedded throughout all aspects of learning.
• Develop musical talents, aiding confidence, creativity and personal achievement.
• Learn to listen and appraise across a wide range of genres, compose and improvise using tuned and untuned instruments, and perform and share to a variety of audiences.
• Have complete accessibility to holistic happiness through expression and feeling.

Music Skills Domains

At NET Academies to be a musician, pupils will have the opportunity to develop skills in the following domains:

• Listening and appraising: Listen to, review and evaluate music across a range of historical periods, genres, styles and traditions, including the works of the great composers and musicians. 
• Theory of music: Applying knowledge of interrelated musical skills and notation with musical activities, singing and playing. 
• Creating and exploring: Applying skills through improvisation and composition.  
• Performing: Using skills and knowledge of music effectively to deliver performances. 

Based on the National Curriculum, the intent for both key stages 1 and 2 are as follows: 

Key stage 1

• Pupils should be taught to:
• use their voices expressively and creatively by singing songs and speaking chants and rhymes
• play tuned and untuned instruments musically
• listen with concentration and understanding to a range of high-quality live and recorded music
• experiment with, create, select and combine sounds using the interrelated dimensions of music: pitch, duration, dynamics, tempo, timbre, texture, structure and appropriate musical notations.

Key stage 2

Pupils should be taught to sing and play musically with increasing confidence and control. They should develop an understanding of musical composition, organising and manipulating ideas within musical structures and reproducing sounds from aural memory. 

Pupils should be taught to: 

• play and perform in solo and ensemble contexts, using their voices and playing musical instruments with increasing accuracy, fluency, control and expression
• improvise and compose music for a range of purposes using the interrelated dimensions of music
• listen with attention to detail and recall sounds with increasing aural memory
• use and understand staff and other musical notations
• appreciate and understand a wide range of high-quality live and recorded music drawn from different traditions and from great composers and musicians
• develop an understanding of the history of music.

Organisation of the Curriculum

Our music curriculum is a combination of various publications and resources. 

There are 6 units per year for Years 1 to 6. Within EYFS, this is  

• The Charanga Musical School Scheme provides week-by-week lessons for each year group in the school from ages 5-11. It provides lesson plans, assessment, clear progression, and engaging whiteboard resources for every lesson. The Scheme supports all the requirements of the national curriculum – this is the primary source of our curriculum. 
• O-Generator is a music making tool developed by O-Music for use in Essex schools. It allows students to Create, Learn, Play and Perform Music at school, and at home as O-Generator runs as cloud software.  It is a simple and powerful way to learn and teach composition. Perfect for KS2. 
• Ukulele Magic is the perfect tutor for children and for teachers. Rock to ragtime, bluegrass to swing, tango, calypso and the blues - they're all here in instantly accessible songs to play straight away.  The teacher's edition, contains a whiteboard e-book with embedded audio and video tutorials for every song. 
• Various recorder tutor books are used, in combination with Charanga Recorder Scheme, to introduce the first six notes through a mixture of well-known and original tunes. Children are taught how to read standard notation, performing notes of different durations and dynamics using the correct technique. 

The strands of learning, within our music curriculum, are built upon as the children progress through the school. They will access a wide range of musical styles, genres, vocabulary and musical instruments throughout their time at Jerounds.