In this topic children learn to sing the song ‘Once a Man Fell in a Well’ and to play it using tuned percussion, adding sound effects, experimenting with timbre and dynamics and using letter notation to write a melody

Pupils who are secure will be able to:

• Clap the rhythm of their name.
• Sing the melody accurately while playing their instrument in time.
• Show a range of emotions using their voices.
• Describe the dynamics and timbre of their pieces.
• Play a known melody from letter notation in the right order, if not with the right rhythms.
• Play a new melody from letter notation in the right order, if not in time.
• Invent a melody, write it down and play it back.
• Select instruments with different timbres.
• Compose and perform a piece using different dynamic levels.

Key skills

• Recognising timbre changes and structural features in music they listen to.
• Beginning to use musical vocabulary to describe music.
• Identifying melodies that move in steps.
• Listening to and repeating a short, simple melody by ear.
• Suggesting improvements to their own and others’ work.
• Selecting and creating longer sequences of appropriate sounds with voices or instruments to represent a given idea or character.
• Successfully combining and layering several instrumental and vocal patterns within a given structure.
• Creating simple melodies from five or more notes.
• Choosing appropriate dynamics, tempo and timbre for a piece of music.
• Using letter name and graphic notation to represent the details of their composition.
• Using their voices expressively when singing, including the use of basic dynamics (loud and quiet).
• Singing short songs from memory, with melodic and rhythmic accuracy.
• Copying longer rhythmic patterns on untuned percussion instruments, keeping a steady pulse.
• Performing expressively using dynamics and timbre to alter sounds as appropriate.
• Singing back short melodic patterns by ear and playing short melodic patterns from letter notation.

Key knowledge

• To understand that ‘melody’ means a tune.
• To know that ‘notation’ means writing music down so that someone else can play it.
• To understand that ‘accompaniment’ can mean playing instruments along with a song.
• To understand that a melody is made up from high and low pitched notes played one after the other, making a tune.

Key vocabulary

rhythm

pulse

dynamics

timbre

beat

melody

notation