We believe that the teaching of Music at Eskdale is of a high quality, which engages and inspires our pupils to develop a love of music, develop their talent as musicians and lay the foundations for further music teaching beyond key stage two.
The learning of Music at Eskdale is rooted in all five of our core values I and as such, we believe that music significantly contributes to pupil personal development: increasing a sense of well-being and belonging, confidence and self-esteem, whilst providing opportunities to further develop leadership, team working, concentration and problem-solving skills, so relevant and transferable to other curriculum subjects.
Our core intent is to enable our pupils to strive to:
✓ Understand and explore how music is created, developed and shared, using and understanding various musical elements, notation and vocabulary correctly.
✓ Learn to sing and use their voices with increasing accuracy, fluency, control and expression.
✓ Improvise, create, compose and improve their own music, independently and with others, using and understanding the musical staff, various musical elements, vocabulary and technology, where appropriate.
✓ Learn to play a musical instrument with increasing accuracy, fluency, control and expression with the opportunity to progress and excel.
✓ Develop listening skills, aural memory and an understanding of the history of music through an increasing appreciation of music from around the world from different genres, traditions, composers and musicians.
Music is taught discretely by our music specialist, Ms Howes, following the ‘Think like a Musician’ process model approach. This incorporates the following stages of learning:
Exposure - Where children ask the question ‘What’s it all about and why?’ and find out about the specific area of music being studied, for example a specific genre, instrument or skill.
Practical – ‘How do we do it?’ Where appropriate, children apply music theory and find out/learn the skills involved in engaging and progressing with the topic.
Application – ‘Let’s do it!’ Children engage in the practical activity with an ‘I do, we do, you do’ approach and where relevant practise individually, in pairs and small groups.
Evaluate and Feedback – Children discuss the question ‘How did it go?’ with the support of the teacher and peers, to formally and informally assess performances and improve work based on relevant feedback.
Opportunities are also taken wherever possible to make cross-curricular links.
For all our pupils to achieve, both learning more and remembering more, our method of teaching (pedagogy) incorporates meta-cognitive strategies to enable all pupils to retain the learning of both skills and knowledge.
This is typically applied by:
✓ Activating prior learning
✓ Small step teaching delivery
✓ Independent practice
✓ Feedback