Music

Intent - what do we want for our developing musicians?

At Horn’s Mill, our music curriculum is rooted in skills progression, ensuring challenge is provided for every child and technical vocabulary is taught across all year groups. When creating our school’s music curriculum, we worked with music experts from our feeder high school to ensure that the music education that we provide enables our children to have sufficient knowledge and skills to be ready for the next stages of their music education once they leave us. Equally, we designed a curriculum to ensure that children leave Horn’s Mill as confident musicians with a love for singing and a range of rich musical experiences that inspire a lifelong love of music.

Throughout the curriculum, children are given opportunities to

• Listen and appraise music within a diverse range of genres and historical periods
• Sing and immerse themselves in song
• Play and compose music
• Develop their skills of playing a range of instruments, including the tuned instruments: glockenspiel, violin, ukulele and recorder

Implementation - How is the curriculum delivered?

During our class music lessons, children listen, sing, appraise, compose, play and  perform with their peers and teacher following our bespoke curriculum.  We use music grids in a progressive way to enable children to understand the key elments, and know the vocabulary associated with learning about music. 

Curriculum Enrichment

To enhance the teaching of music in lessons, we work with musical experts to ensure that every child is given a range of rich musical experiences and opportunities to perform with other children from other schools. We work closely with the company, AmaSing, who provide singing and composing sessions. For example, in Year 6, children compose their own leavers’ song with musicians and songwriters from AmaSing and a song, which our children created called ‘Build a world’, was used in 2022 as a song for all local primary schools to sing together and perform.

Weekly singing assemblies allow children to sing together in celebration, and to hone the skills and review the knowledge taught in the classrooms.

We provide extracurricular musical opportunities, including taking part in Ho Ho Helsby and performing at Manchester Arena as part of the Young Voices Concert.  Horn's Mill has a large school choir which performs locally at every opportunity.  Celebrating music creates an opportunity to bring the community together and alongside other curriculum subjects, we perform musical compositions to parents, family members, local residents and residents of our local care homes.

We invest in children’s skills as musicians to ensure that they gain the confidence and skills to perform within school and at local community events. Hence, 'Music For Life' are employed in school to provide whole class specialist musical instrument teaching in Year 2 (ukulele) and Year 4 (Violin). Children are offered opportunities to further these skills through subsidised individual or small group lessons, and through attending an after school club which provides opportunities for children to showcase their talents. For example, every year at Horn’s Mill, we hold a Musical Extravaganza where children across the school perform for an audience.  

Reading across the curriculum

In order to develop children's reading skills, our teaching staff plan opportunities for children to independently read age-appropriate texts that link to the music knowledge being studied, or learning that has been previously taught. Whole class reading lessons from Year 2 and throughout KS2 are planned to give children the opportunities to study the lyrics and listen to various genres of music. For example, as part of Year 6s listening and appraisal of musicals, the children study 3 songs from musicals: ‘Speechless’ from Aladdin, ‘Defying Gravity’ from Wicked and ‘Waving through a Window’ from Dear Evan Hansen. During Year 5s learning around Walt Disney in Art, children study 3 songs from Disney movies: ‘Be prepared’ from The Lion King, ‘Out there’ from The Hunchback of Notre Dame and ‘Go the distance’ from Hercules.

Impact - How do we know our Art curriculum is effective?

Pupil Voice

We value listening to the voice of our children to assess the knowledge and progress they have made. Children confidently use the vocabulary identified in our music curriculum.  

High-Quality Outcomes

Children's voices and growing musical talents are evidenced through the performances in school that show progress in complexity as children journey through the school.

Clear end points are indentified at the end of our curriculum document below which demonstrate the key vocabularly, knowledge, experiences and understanding that children will have developed at the end of each key stage.

If you have any further enquiries relating to the music curriculum, please email Miss Emma McMuldroch on emcmuldroch@hornsmill.cheshire.sch.uk.