The children at St Christopher's primary school love music! We love listening, playing, composing and performing! Music is a universal language and it has the power to inspire our creativity and invoke feelings and memories. It is relevant to our children and boosts their self esteem and confidence.
"Music is a universal language that embodies one of the highest forms of creativity. A high-quality music education should engage and inspire pupils to develop a love of music and their talent as musicians, and so increase their self-confidence, creativity and sense of achievement."
(National Curriculum 2021)
St Christopher's use an online scheme of work called 'Singup' which supports the new music model curriculum. This will be used to teach music throughout the school. This scheme provides exciting units of work for the children from Reception right the way up to Year 6 with an emphasis on encouraging the children's listening, composing and performing skills.
Each year group will complete a number of units from Singup per year. Units consist of both songs and instrumental works with children being given the opportunity to develop their singing skills as well as playing instruments. At the end of each unit of work the children will perform and record the song or piece of music they have been working towards.
In addition to this, this year we have brought 'We create music' into school to teach Year 5 and year 6 whole class ukulele tuition at different points in the year. The children love learning this new skill and under the tutelage of Mr Cook they improve and develop their skills and musical understanding week by week. Each term our musicians perform a concert in school (along with our talented choir) to parents and children.
Outside of the classroom we have lots going on with Music. St. Christopher's have an incredibly talented Key Stage 2 choir who enjoy learning a repertoire of songs and performing around the city through a range of events. The choir regularly perform in school to parents and children, and every year they venture out during the festive period to a variety of local businesses including Dobbies, Jaguar, Toby Carvery, Morrisons and to sing carols and spread their Christmas cheer.
In addition to this 'We create music' offer after school tuition in Guitar and Ukulele to children in KS1 and 2.
Singing is also encouraged in Foundation Stage and Key Stage One. Every Christmas the children of Key Stage 1 perform an all singing all dancing Christmas Nativity and a small group of Year 1 and 2 children sing carols in Morrisons to raise money for the school.
Every child in the school gets the opportunity to sing during assemblies and during church services. We have an extremely talented and enthusiastic bunch of staff and children who embrace music and singing in St. Christopher's.