Intent

Music at Meath Green Junior School celebrates collaboration and creativity. It encourages children to be brave in sharing their ideas and to feel immensely proud of themselves when performing individually, as an ensemble and as a whole-school. As a community, we share the joy of listening with respect and gratitude and provide a wide variety of opportunities for children to contribute to the enjoyment of music making together. Children share their love of singing through performing in the local community, gaining a deeper and meaningful understanding of where they live. At the core, music at Meath Green Junior School is fun, diverse and accessible to all.

Implementation

We pride ourselves on singing at MGJS. This is embedded into our curriculum and we all join together at least once a week and celebrate singing as a school. Our curriculum is based around our musical threads which are:

-singing

-listening and understanding

-improvising and composing

-playing and performing

Within these threads, the inter-related dimensions of music are taught and the skills are built upon and revisited, following a spiral curriculum. Each year, each year group spends at least a term learning an instrument, creating opportunities for expression and individual creativity. Children have opportunities to perform through singing assemblies, our much-loved choir, termly performances, and we have our fantastic rock ensemble run by Rocksteady. Our curriculum is topic based where possible and links are drawn through our music lessons and across the curriculum supported by the use of the Charanga scheme where suitable.

Impact

Our music curriculum is planned in order to revisit, build on and embed musical skills. We focus on progression of skills, knowledge and vocabulary. Children of all abilities have access to a varied music curriculum, allowing them to express their individual creativity. With access to a variety of instruments including keyboards, recorders, ukulele, samba drums, percussion instruments, and vocals, all children can achieve. Children gain an understanding of the history and culture of many genres of music, as well as ethnicities from across the world. We measure the impact of our curriculum through:

• Pupil voice
• Subject monitoring with music lead
• Termly reporting and tracking against objectives
• Photos, recordings and/or video evidence of practical learning
• Use of assessment tools provided within the Charanga scheme