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Upper Beeding Primary School

Music at Upper Beeding

At Upper Beeding Primary School, it is our intent to nurture a life-long passion and appreciation of all styles of music.  We strongly believe that music is fundamental to our children’s education, which can enhance key life skills such as increased confidence, development of social skills and enable them to tap into their inner creative spirits.  Our lessons provide opportunities for children to react and appreciate a range of musical styles and develop their language skills.  We show how music can not only evoke a range of emotions and feelings but can also ‘tell a story’. 

Our aim is to enable children, regardless of background, ability and additional needs to be motivated, effective and independent life-long learners.  By offering a stimulating and carefully structured experience in music, we enable each individual pupil to develop the capacity and the capability for artistic thought and critical awareness, and develop the necessary skills to enable them to succeed.     

IMPLEMENTATION

What do we teach? What does this look like?


We recognise that if our children have access to high quality experiences this will ultimately raise standards and promote accelerated learning. 

We follow the National Curriculum supported by a clear skills and knowledge progression. This ensures that skills and knowledge are built on year-by-year and sequenced appropriately to maximise learning for all children.  We ensure that the children sing, listen, play, perform and evaluate. This is embedded in all the classroom activities.  Children are taught to play tuned and untuned percussion instruments, recorders / ocarinas and keyboards in their lessons, which also enables them to gain an understanding of basic music notation.  They also explore structure and organisation whilst developing a sense of melody[h1] .   They use the building blocks of music when composing and access a range of technical vocabulary to describe elements such as volume, pitch, beat and rhythm.  [h2] They learn how to work together and compose music using a given stimulus.  Finally, they are taught how to listen, appreciate and evaluate each other’s performance.

 

Performance opportunities are wide-spread at Upper Beeding Primary school. Christmas is a special time where every child is involved in a public performance whether it be a nativity production or a concert.  Years 3&4 lead our Harvest Festival celebrations with acting, singing and dancing whilst our older children in UKS2 enjoy staging a musical production.   Children from Year 4 are invited to attend the Young Voices O2 annual concert and we also hold a variety of singing ventures including a vocal workshop at Chichester Cathedral, our local primary schools singing festival and a Year 5 vocal workshop at Christ’s Hospital led by the esteemed conductor, David Lawrence. 

 

Weekly instrumental lessons are offered and led by visiting peripatetic teachers on the piano, violin, cello, flute, saxophone, drums and guitar.

 

IMPACT
What will this look like? What tools would we like our children to have when they leave our school?

Our vision is to equip each child with the tools to enable them to play a future positive role in the wider community.  We do this by nurturing our children to become ambitious learners so that they demonstrate passion about their learning and are motivated to achieve the best they can both now and in the future.  Through music, we like to stretch the children to reach their full potential, and recognise the development of self-esteem and confidence. 

 

This will be evident through:

 

  • A musical understanding underpinned by high levels of aural perception, internalisation and knowledge of music, including high or rapidly developing levels of technical expertise.

 

  • Very good awareness and appreciation of different musical traditions and genres.

 

  • An excellent understanding of how musical provenance - the historical, social and cultural origins of music - contributes to the diversity of musical styles.

 

  • The ability to give precise verbal explanations, using musical terminology effectively, accurately and appropriately.

 

  • A passion for and commitment to a diverse range of musical activities.