Music

At Edgar Sewter Primary, we firmly believe in the importance of educating the whole child. As

such, we have decided that today, tomorrow and in the future, the underlying driving forces of our curriculum will be:

Exploring our local community within the wider world

Developing our emotional and Social Awareness

Discovering new Possibilities

The  music curriculum has so many links with these curriculum drivers above and helps to develop these skills in the children at our school. 

Music helps us to make links with our community. At Edgar Sewter Primary School we take part in lots of musical events in our wider community. These range from taking part in performances in our classrooms and in assemblies to performing on stage at the Halesworth Cut Theatre and Snape Maltings. We also love to perform at our Christmas and Summer fayres. We like performing to people we know and to people we don’t know. We also like watching other people perform music, including professional musicians who inspire us to learn more. Our topics also teach us about the wider world as we listen to music from around the world. We all gravitate to different types of music. Discussing our musical experiences with each other also helps us to find different types of music to enjoy. 

Music is soothing and calming for a lot of us in our daily lives. As we all know, focusing on our mental health is so important, especially after experiencing what we have all experienced in recent times. At Edgar Sewter Primary School we enjoy listening to and making music. It lets us explore our feelings in a creative way. We talk about and explore how different types of music make us feel, sometimes using stories to help put words to the sounds that we are creating. Music is also a very sociable subject. In our lessons, we learn how to listen to and play with others. We learn how playing or singing with others can greatly improve the piece of music that we produce. Performing, whether this be in a class group or in our choir or as a solo, also brings with it the possibility for experiencing more self awareness and developing our self confidence. 

At Edgar Sewter we enjoy learning and experiencing new things. We listen to all different types of music, relating to the topic that we are covering, giving us another layer of experience and understanding of the people or time period or project that we are investigating. In our topics, we ask questions. This is important in our music lessons too. We wonder why pieces were written in the way they were, including why certain instruments were used. As we develop our vocabulary we ask more questions, for example about tempo and pitch. We learn by asking questions, so we ask them! When creating our own music, we use what we have learnt and make pieces that are new and exciting. We rehearse and adapt our pieces, learning to be critical and solve issues that arise. We are critical about other composers' work too. We learn that we are creators and artists, and pretty fabulous ones at that!

At Edgar Sewter Primary School we all have a music lesson each week. Throughout the term, we also take every opportunity to listen to and discuss any music that links to our topics. In our weekly lessons, we follow the Charanga  music programme which teaches us the musical skills outlined in the  Model Music Curriculum: Key Stages 1 and 2. Following this programme ensures that we are all learning the musical skills in a sequential manner, building on our previous skills and becoming better musicians. We also use this programme to teach us musical vocabulary, building on the vocabulary learnt in previous years. We use instruments and our singing voices to develop our skills and to, most importantly, have a lot of fun together! 

Teachers monitor our progress and make any adaptions to their plans as necessary and make sure that we are working on the next skill that we need to be working on. The music co-ordinator talks to the teachers, offering advice and guidance, ordering any resources needed and monitoring the teaching of music by observing our lessons and talking to us about what we have been learning. This is fed back to make our lessons even better. When we recently talked to our music coordinator, we said we want more music lessons and she can’t blame us, music is marvellous!