At St. Michael's we offer many exciting and varied musical opportunities as part of music lessons and extra-curricular clubs.

Intent

The National Curriculum for music aims to ensure that all children:

• perform, listen to, review and evaluate music;
• are taught to sing, create and compose music;
• understand and explore how music is created, produced and communicated

At St. Michael's we offer many exciting and varied musical opportunities as part of music lessons and extra-curricular clubs. We aim for children to gain a firm understanding music through listening, singing, playing, evaluating, analysing, and composing across a wide. However, our intent goes much further than the curriculum requirements; we would like as many children as possible to experience the raw and powerful emotions that music can elicit, not only by listening to it, but by being an active participant in music making as much as possible.

Implementation

The music curriculum ensures children sing, listen, play, perform and evaluate.This is embedded in the classroom through a structured music curriculum, including Music Express, as well as the weekly singing assemblies, concerts and performances, musical clubs and teaching from specialist music teachers.

All children in Year 4 learn either a woodwind (clarinet or caxophone) or Brass (trumpet, trombone or baritone) instrument under the instruction of Specialist tutors staff. They develop an understanding of breath control, musical notation and playing as part of an ensemble. Children who show a particular talent for their instrument are invited to continue instruction through small group lessons in Years 5 and 6, and become part of the School Band.

Singing is a key part of life at St. Michael's. All children regularly sing during collective acts of worship, as part of church services and for performances at special times of the year such as class assemblies and Christmas plays. We are very proud of our award winning Key stage 2 choir comprising of children selected from Years 3-6. Throughout the year they perform at school, within the local community, and have at larger venues such as Symphony Hall in Birmingham. The school choir was the first primary to school to sing choral evensong at Lichfield Cathedral in 2013.

Impact

Our music Curriculum is planned to demonstrate progression and build on and embed current skills. We focus on progression of knowledge and skills in the different musical components and teaching of vocabulary also forms part of the units of work. If children are achieving the knowledge and skills in lessons, then they are deemed to be making good or better progress.

We measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods:

• Pupil discussions and interviewing the pupils about their learning (pupil voice).
• Governor monitoring with our subject music link governor.
• Termly reporting and tracking of standards across the curriculum.
• Photo and video evidence of the pupils practical learning
• Attendance at extra-curricular events and concerts.