Our Curriculum Intent for Music

Music Education at Fleet Infant School is planned to inspire a love of music and develop children’s understanding of the musical elements, through an active involvement in performing, composing and appraising. Music is used to unite the school. Children come together weekly to sing, and music plays an important role in increasing children’s emotional well-being and confidence.

In KS1, the children enjoy singing songs and speaking chants and rhymes. They have the opportunity to play both tuned and percussion instruments which they use to create, select and combine sounds. They also listen and move to a wide range of music.

The curriculum for Music at Fleet Infant School has been developed to ensure:

• Pupils make excellent progress in the acquisition of skills and knowledge for Music
• Pupils have the opportunity to develop a love of music and their talents as a musician including singing, experimenting, composition, performing and listening
• Knowledge and skills are taught in a logical progression so that all pupils are able to acquire the intended skills and knowledge by the end of Key Stage 1
• Music skills are taught within the context of a blocked unit enabling rich contexts, enrichment links with other subjects, breadth of learning, high expectations and a purpose for learning
• Pupils have the opportunities to be curious, show concentration and perseverance, self-reflect, develop independence and collaborate
• Rich dialogue and subject-specific vocabulary is written for each unit, drawing upon learning objectives as detailed in our Progression of Skills and Knowledge for Music. The strands of singing, performing, improvising, composing and listening are fully covered across all units.

Assessment

• Teaching builds up pupils’ knowledge and skills in long term memory because progress is knowing more and remembering more and enables pupils to perform more complex tasks over time
• Teachers make links with previous learning to support automaticity and independence
• Teachers have a clear understanding of gaps in skills and knowledge for individual pupils and plan to address these
• Teacher use assessments to check planned skills/knowledge have been remembered and pupils have a high level of automaticity/ independence

The Curriculum Leader for Music evaluates the impact of the curriculum through topic reviews, moderation activities, curriculum team subject reviews, learning walks, pupil interviews, data analysis and work sampling. The Curriculum Leader is able to: 

• Demonstrate that pupils reach the school’s end of KS1 expectations. Where pupils are working below age related expectations (ARE) we are able to demonstrate sustained improvement in their subject knowledge/understanding/skills in relation to their prior attainment 
• Demonstrate that the planned curriculum is taught 
• Discuss strengths and development needs in Music 
• Demonstrate that pupils are enthusiastic about the subject and highly motivated to learn showing curiosity, perseverance, self-reflection and independence