Autumn

Rock and Roll

Learning about the origin and features of rock and roll music, pupils learn how to play the Hand Jive and Rock Around the Clock, looking specifically at a walking bass line, before then performing a piece as a class.

The children will:

Hand Jive – After learning about the origins and features of Rock and Roll music, pupils then perform the hand jive.

Rock around the clock – Pupils learn to sing and perform the rock and roll song ‘Rock Around The Clock’

Walking bass line – Using glockenspiels or keyboards, pupils learn to play a rock and roll bass line.

Performing the bass – Building upon the previous lesson, pupils play and perform the remainder of the rock and roll bass line, focussing on playing accurately and in time.

Rock and Roll performance – By the end of the lesson the class will perform ‘Rock Around the Clock’ together, with pupils taking on different roles and instruments.

 

Body and Tuned percussion: Rainforest

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.

The children will:

Pitter Patter Raindrops – Listening to the body percussion piece ‘Rain Sound’, children are introduced to the terms ‘structure’ and ‘texture’ and tasked with identifying these features within the music they hear.

Rainforest body percussion – Children work in pairs to practice the ‘Boom, Snap, Clap’ rhythm using body percussion, personalising their sequence with the introduction of a ‘stamp’

The rhythm of the forest floor – Children begin their rainforest compositions with the forest floor and understory layers, creating body percussion rhythms to suit the movement of the animals within each of the two layers.

The loopy rainforest – Moving onto tuned percussion instruments, children create ‘repeated melodies’ or ‘loops’ for the canopy and emergent layers of the rainforest, taking into consideration pitch and tempo

Sounds of the rainforests – Children combine the four sections of their compositions, building structure through combining rhythms and melodies and adding dynamics and tempo.

 

Spring

Developing singing: Vikings

Full details to follow

 

Summer

Haiku, music and performance: Hanami festival

This Japanese inspired topic looks at the springtime festival of Hanami, otherwise known as ‘The Cherry Blossom Festival’ which celebrates the fleeting beauty of spring flowers. Children use descriptive vocabulary to create a Haiku, put it to music and finally add percussion sound effects to bring all elements together before a final, group performance.

The children will:

Describing Blossom – After learning all about the Japanese festival of Hanami, children immerse themselves in spring blossom trees to come up with descriptive vocabulary to describe what they can see, smell hear and feel.

Sounds of Blossom – By creating sounds to represent their descriptive words from Lesson 1, children play the soundtrack of a blossom tree on a range of percussion instruments.

Blossom Haiku – Using their descriptive vocabulary about cherry blossoms from Lesson 1, children write a well-known form of Japanese poetry – the Haiku.

Haiku Melodies – Children compose a melody to accompany their haikus, working as part of a group and recording the notes as they work.

Haiku Performance – The lesson sees a culmination of all that the children have learnt as they sing the haiku to their original melody with accompanying sounds effects.

 

Jazz: Types of jazz and playing percussion 

 

The children will:

Ragtime – Pupils learn about the style of ragtime music and learn to play ‘off the beat’ and to sing and clap a syncopated rhythm.

Dixieland – Learning about the Dixieland style of music, pupils improvise a call and response in time with the music.

Scat singing – Pupils create a scat singing call (where musicians make up words and sounds to mimic the sounds of an instrument) and perform it to the class, who respond by repeating what they’ve heard.

Jazz motifs – Learning that a motif is a short snippet of music which repeats, pupils write their own jazz motifs, using a swung rhythm.

Swung rhythms – Pupils play a jazz version of a nursery rhyme using tuned percussion.