Music Curriculum Intent
At Dean Field School, we teach music with the aim of helping children discover their musical potential and develop a lifelong passion for music. Our curriculum, guided by the Kapow scheme, provides a structured and exciting approach to music education that supports children in becoming confident performers, composers, and listeners. We focus on developing essential skills, knowledge, and understanding, fostering a deep connection to music across genres, cultures, and time periods.
By following the Kapow music scheme, we ensure that children explore music from around the world and across generations, learning to respect and appreciate diverse musical traditions and communities. Through this curriculum, children will build a wide range of musical skills including singing, playing both tuned and untuned instruments, improvising, composing, and listening critically. They will also gain an understanding of the history, cultural context, and notation of the music they encounter.
In addition to musical development, our approach helps children cultivate valuable transferable skills such as teamwork, leadership, creative thinking, problem-solving, decision-making, and performance. These skills not only support their growth as musicians but also benefit their overall development as learners and individuals, both inside and outside of school.
Aims for pupils
At Dean Field, music plays a key role in giving children at our school a vital channel for self-expression. We provide a wealth of opportunities for children to discover, explore and extend their natural talents.
Through our teaching of music, we aim for the children to be:
- Confident performers, composers and listeners and will be able to express themselves musically at and beyond school
- Show an appreciation and respect for a wide range of musical styles from around the world
- Understand the ways in which music can be written down.
- Demonstrate and articulate an enthusiasm for music and identify their own personal musical preferences.
- Meet the end of key stage expectations outlined in the national curriculum for music.
EYFS
In nursery, musical aspects of the children’s work are related to the objectives set out in the Early Learning Goals (ELGs), as outlined in Development Matters. These underpin the curriculum planning for children aged three to five as music makes a significant contribution to the Expressive Arts: Being Imaginative and Expressive. This ensures the nursery children are ready to access the Kapow curriculum in reception.
All of our planning for Reception to year 6 for music comes from the condensed curriculum on https://www.kapowprimary.com/
The scheme takes a holistic approach to music, in which the individual strands of performing, listening, composing, the history of music and the interrelated dimensions of music are woven together to create engaging and enriching learning experiences. It is a spiral curriculum ensuring children return to the same skills and knowledge repeatedly, recapping on prior knowledge and then building on their depth of understanding each time. Lessons are differentiated to ensure that they can be accessed by all pupils and opportunities are provided to stretch pupils’ learning.
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Instrumental Lessons
At Dean Field, we use two units of the Kapow instrumental lessons for glockenspiel in year 3.
Children from years 1 – 6 also have one half term of whole class instrumental lessons provided by Calderdale Music Service. KS2 children participate in Ukulele lessons and children in KS1 participate in percussion lessons.
Additional Music Opportunities
The children participate in singing assemblies where they are given the opportunity to sing together as a whole school. They also take part in monthly “Musician of the Month” assemblies and activities. These are valuable experiences that promote musical appreciation, cultural understanding, and diversity within our school.
Music is also listened to and appraised throughout the school day where appropriate. Teachers select music from the Model Music Curriculum or pieces that link to current curriculum topics.
Each class also has the opportunity to rehearse and perform songs in assemblies throughout the school year.
Children from Years 4–6 have the opportunity to join the school choir, which participates in Young Voices in February as well as performing for the school community and parents. In the spring term, children in Year 3 are invited to join the choir, with additional performance opportunities in the summer, including Voices Together at the Victoria Theatre.
Our annual talent show, “Dean Field’s Got Talent,” provides children with the opportunity to audition, rehearse 1:1 with an adult, and perform their musical talents to the school. This not only builds confidence and performance skills but also supports the development of musical ability in a fun and encouraging environment, enriching the music opportunities we offer at Dean Field.
In addition, Year 5 pupils recently had the opportunity to take part in a high-quality creative arts project working with Lights Camera Score, Three Stones Media, and the English Chamber Orchestra. As part of the “Seeds of Hope” project, pupils helped to create a film, composed and recorded original music, and performed their work live at the Victoria Theatre. This provided a unique and enriching experience, allowing pupils to develop their composition, performance and collaboration skills in a professional arts setting.
