Curriculum Intent
At Bramley Oak, we understand the importance Music can have in the personal development of our pupils. Music has a positive impact on children's mental well-being, and plays a vital role in the development of their minds and creativity which supports their academic achievements. Pupils who are happy and creative are better prepared to find success in their learning, whilst being able to concentrate better, explore and express ideas and be inquisitive learners.
We encourage our pupils to be creative, explore new ideas, and develop the confidence to experiment using instruments and technology to inspire. We want music lessons at Bramley Oak to encourage our pupils to take risks, explore and experiment, and understand the process leading to a final product. We encourage curiosity and we utilise questioning in the journey to ultimately helping every pupil secure new understanding, vocabulary, skills and ideas.
Our music teachers from Surrey Arts have a coherently planned and sequenced curriculum adapted to the needs of every child at Bramley Oak, encompassing the child-centred learning approach that we strive for within our culture and curriculum. Music is taught as a discrete subject in half-termly sequences twice a year to each class.
Implementation
At Bramley, our Music curriculum is aligned with the KS1 and some elements of the KS2 National Curriculum and taught to ensure that they have opportunities to use their voices expressively and creatively by singing songs and speaking chants and rhymes through solfege and developing an understanding of the elements of pitch and rhythm. We enable the pupils to experiment with various instruments and Garageband to explore tuned and untuned instrumental sounds. They use these skills to combine sounds and explore music skills creatively through music composition and beat making. Our music teachers from Surrey Arts promote the subject's enjoyment by creating opportunities to build on learnt skills whilst drawing on various musical influences.
Musical vocabulary is a critical component of music lessons and is explored using instruments and musical pieces to secure understanding. We ensure all units are adapted to ensure pupils can access age-appropriate content regardless of their literacy levels to build and sustain high engagement and appropriate challenge of the subject content. These detail the critical learning and vocabulary pupils will need to support them in their acquisition of knowledge and act as a retrieval practice tool, which helps with independence.
Impact
The impact of our curriculum leads to pupils being able to explore and express their ideas both practically and verbally. Pupils are involved in the evaluation, dialogue and decision-making about the quality of their compositions and the improvements they need to make, giving them both control and ownership over the final product. This supports them in making decisions and talking confidently about their learning journey, helping them develop more vital metacognitive skills. They will also build a more knowledgeable cultural capital as they learn about great musicians throughout time and their cultural impact. Formative assessment throughout the lesson means that teachers can support pupils and provide further challenges where appropriate and evaluation at the end of the learning.
