Subject Focus - Music
At Hermitage Primary School, children receive a Music curriculum which allows them to exercise their creativity through musical expression. Children are taught to perform, 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. Skills are taught progressively to ensure that all children are able to learn and practise in order to develop as they move through the school. Children understand and explore how music is created, produced and communicated, including through the inter-related dimensions: pitch, duration, dynamics, tempo, timbre, texture, structure and appropriate musical notations.
All teaching of Music should provide wide-ranging opportunities for listening, composing and performing. At Hermitage, we follow a structured scheme of work called Charanga which supports the curriculum for music. This scheme is an integrated, practical, exploratory and child-led approach to musical learning.
The interrelated dimensions of music weave through the units of Charanga to encourage the development of musical skills as the learning progresses. Children learn a range of musical skills such as listening and appraising, differing musical activities (including creating and exploring) and performing. Throughout the scheme, children are actively involved in using and developing their singing voices, using body percussion and whole-body actions and learning to handle and play classroom instruments effectively to create and express their own and others’ music. Children have opportunities to explore sounds, listen actively, compose and perform.
