Why we teach your child music
Music - and singing in particular - plays a big part in life in our school. We pride ourselves on the fact that every child has the opportunity to learn how to play an instrument before they leave Langford and that our pupils are confident and enthusiastic performers with a love of music.
In music lessons, we expose our children to a diverse range of high-quality music from a variety of traditions and from great composers and musicians. Children are then able to draw on this increasing aural memory to be able to excel in their musical performance in both solo and ensemble contexts. As children develop their musicality throughout their time at Wilberforce, so too will they benefit from a deepening self-confidence, creativity and sense of success. A love of music is something that can stay with a child for a lifetime and continue to enrich their life and sense of well-being even after they have moved on from our school.
What our curriculum looks like
We use Charanga, an online music education portal that provides a carefully sequenced curriculum that allows students to rapidly develop their aural memory and technical expertise. Each half-termly unit of work explores a musical genre or theme. In every year group, the learning is broken down into five steps that are taught over the course of the half term:
Step 1 – Singing
Step 2 – Playing an instrument
Step 3 – Improvisation
Step 4 – Composition
Step 5 - Performance
In Step 1, the children learn and perform a song that acts as the focus of the unit, going on to appraise and compare other songs that are linked to it in some way at the start of every lesson. in Step 2, the children learn to play a piece of music based on the song on the glockenspiel – we have a class set so that each child has the ample opportunity to develop their skills. In Step 3 they then use this piece of music as a starting point for devising their own improvisations, where we encourage children to use rhythmic and melodic ideas from the piece they have learned. In Step 4, students then compose a short piece of music to play along to the song. At the end of a unit, the students and their teacher will discuss which of these elements they would like to include in their final performance – this is Step 5. Performances are filmed in order to provide opportunities for reflection on their achievements and to see what they could do to improve as musicians.
Rather than focussing solely on the Western tradition of music, we are committed to broadening our children’s musical horizons by exposing then to genres and styles that they might not hear in the course of their everyday life. Some genres and styles covered include:
- Afropop
- Classic Rock
- Bhangra
- Disco
- Old-school hip-hop