Our Learning Sequence

“Express the joy of the situation and the joy to play this music, to sing this music, it’s really fantastic.”

                                                            St. Cecilia

Music at St Thomas Aquinas offers children the opportunity to develop their talents in all aspects of Music: through singing and praising God, playing a range of instruments and music appreciation. Music is a universal language that embodies one of the highest forms of creativity. Therefore our vision for Music at St Thomas Aquinas is that all pupils are engaged and inspired to develop a love and appreciation of music, while their talent as musicians enables their self-confidence and creativity to grow, alongside a sense of achievement.

By the time our pupils leave St Thomas Aquinas children will have participated in a wide range of singing, tuned and untuned percussion work, composition as well as listening to and appreciating a range of musical styles. All children will have been taught the skills to be able to compose using musical instruments, as well as the appropriate musical notation terminology e.g. rhythm, melody, pitch, dynamics. As pupils’ progress through the school, they will have developed a critical engagement with music, allowing them to compose, listen and perform and become confident musicians.

St Thomas Aquinas’s curriculum has been developed in order to be able to deliver the National Curriculum for Music in a way that fosters musical skills, talents, composition and appreciation of a wide genre of music. The teaching of Music at St Thomas Aquinas aims to develop the pupils’ following skills:

EYFS:

• To maintain attention and concentrate and sit quietly during appropriate activity
• To begin to build a repertoire of songs and dances
• To explore the different sounds of instruments

KS1:

• To listen to a wide range of music with concentration and understanding
• To use their voices expressively and creatively by singing songs and speaking chants and rhymes.
• To play a variety of tuned and untuned percussion instruments musically
• To experiment with, create and combine sounds using the interrelated dimensions of music: pitch, dynamics, tempo, duration

KS2:

• To listen with attention to detail and recall sounds with increasing aural memory

• To appreciate and understand a wide range of music from historical periods, genres, styles and traditions, including the works of the great composers and musicians
• To improvise and compose music for a range of purposes through the interrelated dimensions of music: pitch, duration, dynamics, tempo, timbre, texture, structure and appropriate musical notations
• To play and perform using their voices and instruments in solo and ensemble groups, using their voices and playing instruments with increasing accuracy, fluency, control and expression

Teachers will plan to incorporate Music meaningfully and where appropriate, into their topic-based learning, whilst following the ‘Charanga’ scheme of work and our learning sequence:

• Listen
• Explore
• Perform
• Evaluate