The Music Curriculum at St Catherine’s is designed to give maximum enjoyment of music, offering a variety of styles and activities for the children to experience.   The children receive dedicated music lessons which are designed to give a firm understanding and experience of the 5 core elements of music: Performing, composing, inter related dimensions of music, listening and the history of music.  We contextualise our curriculum to be unique for St Catherine’s and to celebrate special events such as the Coronation.

Using instruments and composing is an essential element, allowing all children the opportunity to express themselves creatively.  Our compositions are based around a style or piece of music, which will be listened to, discussed and used as a stimulus for our own creations.  All lessons include an element of singing, listening and the inter related dimensions of music, such as understanding notation, note values, rhythm and dynamics.  The children will use these elements in their own music compositions.

Singing is at the heart of St Catherine’s, we pride ourselves on our childrens’ beautiful voices and celebrate these regularly at school events.  The children have weekly singing assemblies where we rehearse and learn both new and challenging music, alongside some of our   favourites.  Year 2 take part annualy in the Barnet Infant Music Festival, they learn and perform a variety of songs with other schools and perform a piece of their own, this may be a song or a composition.  All the children sing during Mass and other school services.

In year 4 the children learn to play the recorder, in line with the new model curriculum, this gives them experience of playing an instrument, ensemble playing, understanding and reading notation, along with the opportunity of composing and notating tunes.  Going on from this they are able to use their recorders in years 5 and 6.

Our curriculum celebrates World Music, blues and Jazz, rap, hip hop and a variety of other styles.  These are regularly looked at in many of our topics, to compare and contrast different styles of music.

KS1

Our aims

  1. To develop the children’s ability to sing confidently together and individually with accurate pitching and intonation, and expression
  2. Introduce children to controlling and performing using instruments
  3. Develop a strong sense of pitch and rhythm
  4. Expose children to a wide range of styles and forms of music.
  5. Create a descriptive and analytical vocabulary for discussing and interpreting music.

After half term these aims will be developed through learning rehearsing songs and pieces for performance in their end of term Christmas Show.

KS2

Our aims:

  1. All children will have had the opportunity to learn an instrument by the end of the key stage:
    Year 3 and Year 4 will be learning the recorder this year inline with the new Model Music Curriculum
  2. Children will a clear understanding of how to use their voice to sing and perform expressively both in groups and individually.
    Singing in Unison
    Performing rounds and canons
    Singing works written in two or more independent parts.
  3. Can compose pieces using a range of techniques and for different purposes:
    Using original material or pieces from our song repertoire to build up motifs, cyclic patterns and ostinati.
    Structuring music into contrasting sections.
    Exploring using language and verse.
    Combining appropriate melodic shapes using a tone set to create a mode.
    Using regular meter.
  4. All children will have a working knowledge of stick notation and rhythm sol-fa as a working tool for performance.
  5. Children will be able to respond analytically and discuss music we listen to using an appropriate vocabulary for:
    Meter
    Rhythm
    Pitch
    Dynamics
    Phrasing
    Harmony
  6. By the end of key stage children will be familiar with, and developed an understanding of, a range of different historical and socio-cultural styles of music.

Peripatetic Lessons

St Catherine’s currently provides individual tuition in a variety of musical instruments. Our teachers are both private teachers and Barnet Education Arts Trust teachers.  We currently offer lessons in:

Woodwind Flute Clarinet Saxophone Recorder

Strings Violin

Keyboard Piano

Guitar acoustic

If you are interested in either Piano or Violin, please head to the BEAT website to register an interest.  If you are interested in Guitar or Woodwind, please contact the school office.