Music
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