At Wenlock CE Academy, we take pride in our vibrant music curriculum. In addition to weekly music lessons, we sing together in Collective Worship each day and feature a Song of the Week, introducing children to both new and familiar songs that reflect our school values. A peripatetic teacher visits weekly to offer one-to-one instrumental lessons, and our weekly choir club provides further opportunities for children to develop their singing skills. We also create many opportunities for students to perform outside of school.

Autumn 2024

Year 3 - Ballads. Children learn what ballads are, how to identify their features and how to convey different emotions when performing them. Using an animation as inspiration, children carefully select vocabulary to describe the story, before turning them into lyrics by incorporating rhyming words and following the structure of a traditional ballad.

Year 3 - Creating compositions in response to an animation (Theme: Mountains). Learning to tell stories through music. Listening to music and considering the narrative it could represent. Paying close attention to the dynamics, pitch and tempo and how they change. Creating original compositions to match an animation, building up layers of texture.

Year 4 - Body and tuned percussion (Theme: Rainforests). A topic of discovery; children will explore the rainforest through music and be introduced to new musical terms. They will also use a mixture of body percussion and tuned percussion instruments as the children create their own rhythms of the rainforest, layer by layer.

Year 4 - Rock and roll. Learning about the origin and features of rock and roll music, pupils learn how to play the Hand Jive and  bass line, before performing a piece as a class.

Year 5 - Composition notation (Theme: Ancient Egypt). Based on the theme of Ancient Egypt, children learn to identify the pitch and rhythm of written notes and experiment with notating their compositions, developing their understanding of staff notation.

Year 5 - Blues. Children are introduced to this famous genre of music and its history, and learn to identify the key features and mood of Blues music and its importance and purpose. They also get to grips with the 12-bar Blues and the Blues scale, and combine these to create an improvised piece with a familiar, repetitive backing.

Year 6 - Dynamics, pitch and texture (Theme: Coast - Fingal’s Cave by Mendelssohn). Appraising the work of Mendelssohn and further developing improvisation and composition skills.

Year 6 - Film music. Exploring and identifying the characteristics of film music. Creating a composition and graphic score to perform alongside a film.

Music Mark is a yearly recognition for schools that shows how we put music at the heart of the school.  See more details here.
https://www.musicmark.org.uk/join/schools/