Music in Year 1
Term 1 MOVE TO THE BEAT – exploring pulse and rhythm
For children to understand pulse, they need to feel it. The songs and activities suggested for this term will help them do just that! This term, the children will learn to recognize pulse, matching movements to music. They will explore percussion instruments and perform simple instrumental accompaniments to familiar songs. The children will progress to copying and creating simple rhythm patterns, eventually using simple graphic notations to represent these sounds. They will be introduced to a range of music and create simple choreography for music such as Radetzky March by Strauss and Mattachins by Peter Warlock, as well as learning about different dance traditions such as South African Gumboot Dancing and North Indian Kathak Dance.
Term 2 Exploring Sounds
This term, the children will explore how sounds can be produced in different ways using voices and instruments. They will listen to a variety of music including Flight Of The Bumblebee and William Tell Overture, and will begin to recognize how composers use dynamics, tempo and timbre to bring a character or theme to life! They will learn to sing simple songs as a class, adding facial expressions and actions to enhance a performance. The children will explore song lyrics and use these as a basis for their own compositions. They will compose short sound sequences to tell a story or reflect a character. They will learn to follow musical instructions and invent their own musical notation.
Term 3 HIGH AND LOW – EXPLORING PITCH
This term, the children will identify and describe pitch. They explore the sounds created by a variety of different instruments and voices, describing their pitch and timbre. They play simple listening games and identify simple pitch patterns in a range of songs and music, recognizing when the pitch gets higher or lower. They use a variety of tuned and untuned percussion instruments and compose simple sound effects to accompany sections of a story. They compose pitch patterns and represent these using creative graphic notation tools such as pipe cleaners and coloured cubes! They will finish the term by preparing songs and music for a class performance.