Becoming a Musician at BFPA
The BFPA Music curriculum is first and foremost designed to help children to feel that they are musical and to develop a life-long love of music. There is a focus on developing skills, knowledge and understanding that our children need in order to become confident performers, composers and listeners. Our curriculum introduces children to music from all around the world and across generations, teaching children to respect and appreciate music of all traditions and communities.
Our children develop the musical skills of singing, playing tuned and untuned instruments, improvising and composing music and listening and responding to music. They develop an understanding of the history and cultural context of the music that they listen to and learn how music can be written down. Through music, our curriculum helps children to develop transferable skills such as team-working leadership, creative thinking, problem-solving, decision making and presentation and performance skills. These skills are vital to children’s development as learners and have a wider application in their general lives outside and beyond school.
Our aim is that children who leave our school in Year 6 will be able:
- Sing and/or play confidently on my own or in a group
- Compose imaginatively using voices and instruments
- Use different musical devices including melody, rhythms, chords and structures
- Have a range of musical vocabulary and the ability to use it to compare and describe a range of music
- Understand the relationship between lyrics and melody
- Listen carefully to, appreciate and appraise a range of music
- Have an understanding of the history of music
How our children learn to be a Musician
The BFPA Music curriculum takes a holistic approach to music in which the individual strands below are woven together to create engaging and enriching learning experiences:
- Performing
- Listening
- Composing
- The history of music
- The inter-related dimensions of music
Our units are made up of five lessons which combine these strands within a topic designed to capture our children’s imagination and encourage them to explore music enthusiastically. Over the course of their journey through BFP, our children are taught how to sing fluently and expressively and play tuned and untuned instruments accurately and with control. They learn to recognise and name the interrelated dimensions of music – pitch, duration, tempo, timbre, structure, texture and dynamics – and use these expressively in their own improvisations and compositions.
Our children are provided with quality resources and experience as much as they can first hand from trips, clubs and visitors. This includes an after-school choir club with participation in the Young Voices concert, the opportunity to learn a brass instrument and to be part of an after-school club and our long running steel pan lessons.
