Music

At Elmhurst, we believe music embraces our individuality, creativity and most importantly, our self-expression. Music is shaped around our whole school intent as it encourages oracy, independence and gives our children rich experiences. Every child should have the opportunity to develop their musical potential and we aim to nurture this across the school. Our music curriculum is working within the national curriculum ensuring that every child has a music education and is exposed to the importance of music.

We have developed our own music curriculum with the help of music projects to inform our planning.  As lessons are taught, they are continually adapted to encourage progression of our pupils as well as the teaching needs of our teachers. We provide team-teaching and INSET training to help our teachers develop.

Our music curriculum has three main elements: listening, performance and notation. Units around each of these elements are planned in for each year group, ensuring progression. Listening is incorporated as a unit as well as being taught as a section of a lesson within various units. Each year group has a listening unit on either world music or western music. They develop their listening skills as they start to identify different musical elements (pitch, dynamic, timbre, texture, and rhythm), instruments and well-known composers. This helps the children to use what they listen to when composing. The performance element is developed across year groups, from performance within class to assemblies. They perform in year group assemblies which incorporates singing. The children are taught instrumental lessons and learn to read basic notation. Notation is introduced and developed from year 2 onwards to provide a basic knowledge of music to aid with instrumental lessons.  For pupils with special educational needs, we have seen that music therapy is invaluable so we offer this for our most vulnerable pupils. Children with SEND respond well to sound and music as it gives them a way to express themselves.

As well as time tabled music lessons, we aim to provide our children with extra music opportunities. This year we have been lucky to be awarded a music grant and are  working closely with Newham Music to see what music we can provide safely in this current climate. As a school we aim to provide cross curricular links – linking music to literacy and stories. Within our curriculum we also provide instrumental lessons for recorder and ukulele and have weekly singing assemblies throughout the whole school led by the music coordinator.

Music Curriculum Map


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