Music

Hello everyone, welcome to the Music page!

On here you'll find out all about what we're getting up to at St Stephen's Church of England Primary to showcase our musical talents! At St Stephen's, we use a Music scheme throughout school called Charanga. This is used as part of fantastic teacher knowledge and skills to provide an all inclusive and enriched Music programme, progressing through all levels of attainment.

Miss A Mathieson is our school's Music Lead

What is our intention?

Our music curriculum intends to inspire creativity, self-expression and encourages our children on their musical journey, as well as giving them opportunities to connect with others- we strive to foster a life-long love of Music by exposing our children to diverse musical experience and igniting a passion for music. We aim to recognise the emotions, social and background of our children to ensure we deliver a bespoke curriculum that is centred all around each individual child as a musician. By listening and responding to different musical styles, finding their voices as singers and performers and as composer, all will enable our children to become confident and reflective musicians. Our music curriculum intends to inspire creativity, self-expression and encourages our children on their musical journey, as well as giving them opportunities to connect with others- we strive to foster a life-long love of Music by exposing our children to diverse musical experience and igniting a passion for music. We aim to recognise the emotions, social and background of our children to ensure we deliver a bespoke curriculum that is centred all around each individual child as a musician. By listening and responding to different musical styles, finding their voices as singers and performers and as composer, all will enable our children to become confident and reflective musicians.

We will expose our children to a diverse range of music genres from different countries, giving them opportunities to develop their confidence in music and through:

Explore: I am a musician because I can listen to and appreciate a range of different musical styles, genres, instruments and songs.
Compose: I am a musician because I can begin to create my own pieces of music influenced by music I have heard and explored.
Perform: I am a musician because I like to perform pieces of music that I have created and develop my confidence.

The Benefits of Music

Music is not only something that can be loved and appreciated by everyone through enjoyment, but it also has lots of educational benefits, particularly for children. Please find a useful website link below and some extracts from this, which highlight just how beneficial Music can be in supporting a young person's academic progress.

-Children who study Music tend to have larger vocabularies

-Children in schools with an enriched Music programme scored higher in Mathematics and English

-Studying Music could have cognitive benefits similar to those evident in bilingual children and can support this

-Everyday listening skills are better in those children who have a more enriched Music programme

-Children with learning needs or dyslexia who may lose focus more easily, tend to benefit greatly from Music lessons

-Children with better Music pedagogy and experience tend to have better memory

Music in School!

How do we implement our intention?

Our children have at least a one hour slot of Music per week in their classes and we offer some extra-curricular activities throughout the year. We currently have a school choir who practise weekly, and a music club for children Year 1-3 that runs for 3 half terms throughout the year. We also have singing practise every Wednesday morning for everyone and singing/music at the heart of all of our daily worships. We also regularly use Music as a way to relax and find time to unwind! Every day after dinner time you will find us relaxing and unwinding to a piece of Music.

Below are some useful Music websites that children can access at home to develop their Musical skills, or to help relax. We use many of these resources in our school too. Teachers use the Charanga scheme as a foundation of teaching, but we have developed many resources and skills over the years to offer our children a much more bespoke curriculum. We regularly use BBC music projects to link with our topic learning, and we sing songs from 'My Muslim songs.org' each half term. We aim to reflect the lives of our learners in the wider world.

We currently mainly follow “Charanga – New Model Music Curriculum” music scheme, which offers fantastic music lessons for our pupils in all year groups, in-line with the National Curriculum and including the updated EYFS Statutory Framework. Charanga teaches children to use the four key skills in music:

Performing – controlling sounds through singing and playing instruments
Composing – creating and developing musical ideas based on musical knowledge
Appraising – responding to how music makes them feel, reviewing their own and others’ compositions
Listening – identifying sounds and techniques used in music

Music taught at St. Michael’s incorporates the National Curriculum goals and helps our children develop a love for music and performance! However, we offer a very bespoke and improved curriculum which reflects our school's diversity and also provides our children with a much more tailored musical education.

St Stephens Progression of Music Skills and Important Documents

SS Music progression skills grid 2024-5.pdf

National Curriculum Music.pdf

Progressiong of skills grid.pdf

Music Overview EYFS-Y6 2023-2024.pdf

Music In Classes

At St Stephens, each year group and class will enjoy up to an hour of Music where we will work on all of our skills- listening, appraising, playing, composing and performing. We will learn about famous composers and musical artistics, enjoy a wide range of music from different cultures, traditions and religions, and learn to play tuned and untuned instruments.

Below are some pictures from different year groups and their musical lessons. Have a look below to see what we get up to!

Music in EYFS-

In the Early Years we enjoy singing lots of nursery rhymes and exploring lots of new and different types of music. We sing songs in different voices and experiment with how we can change our voices when singing or talking. We explore tuned and untuned instruments and learn how to play basic compositions that we create ourselves. Here we are having fun singing some songs that we have learnt, performing them in class and playing a tuned instrument the glockenspiel.

School Choir and Extra Curricular

Our wonderful choir join together weekly to practise singing a range of different songs. We practise songs which we sing regularly, and we always add new songs to our song bank whenever we are thinking about a new RE value each half term. We enjoy singing some Nasheed Choir songs too. We use this website for many of our Nasheed choir songs;

https://muslimsongs.org/home

Throughout the year, we also offer some other extra curricular activities for children to enjoy, and most recently some of our Year 1-3 children have enjoyed recorder club, and an extra club where they have had the opportunity to enhance their skills of playing glockenspiel.

Worship and Singing Practise

We use some fantastic songs as part of our worship in school. Along with producers of various collections that we use, we subscribe to an online source called Fischy.com. The songs have religious and moral content which the children love to sing. The children learn signs along with the songs to help them remember and enjoy the words. The Fischy Music leader Stephen Fischbacher came to school to lead a two day workshop teaching the children new songs which resulted in a performance for the parents. In addition to singing, we listen to a wide range of music on entry and exit to our Worship time with God. This may be quiet and reflective or lively and fun-loving. Each week, we practise our songs in singing practise.

You can visit the Fischy Music website and sample some of the songs using the link below:

https://www.fischy.com/

We also enjoy songs from POP UK (please see below) as well as a whole range of songs from all over the world and from different artists and musicians. We sing Nasheed songs and explore recommended songs from the Model Music Curriculum.

Pop UK

In 2019 we were delighted to be able to welcome back Pop UK! Children in all year groups were able to learn new songs, enjoying singing them and even recording them to make an album! The school was alive with music and the children really enjoyed this experience. Children were able to take part in afternoon and evening concerts, where they sang and performed their new music.

We are still singing some of our Pop UK songs now in 2025! We enjoy visits from POP UK every 5 years, so we are looking forward to welcoming them back next academic year.

Pop UK also offer a free song bank. We regularly use these songs in lessons, for worship, and for our school choir. You can find and listen to lots of their songs below;

https://www.popuk.org/membership-songs