Music lessons have got off to a great start this year with each class focussing on exploring beat and rhythm.

KS1 classes have been playing, listening and differentiating between long and short sounds – with some great work writing out rhythms and patterns of sounds.

Year 3 looked at the rhythm of a french skipping rhyme, noting that they were jumping on the beat and the words formed a rhythm as they jumped.  We also had some fun making up our own words to the same rhythm

Year 4, 5 and 6 have been using rhythm sticks to sound out different rhythms and making up rhythms of their own.

In all classes we have been building listening skills.  A minute of listening is a project where we listen to a minute of music and then discuss what we heard and our response to it – sometimes choosing to draw a picture to convey what we thought.  This week the music was folk music based on a Scottish folk reel – we had some great suggestions with many spotting the violin playing and many also saying it sounded like ‘Cowboy music’ and even a demonstration of Scottish dancing!    Great work!

Emma Stansfield came into all year 3 and 4 classes this week to tell us more about playing and learning the violin and viola – playing lots of different pieces to us – prompting some great discussion about how she created different sounds and a different character for each piece.

Emma teaches violin at the school and has spaces for new pupils.  All year 3 and 4 children should have taken a letter home giving details of what to do if interested – if any other children in other year groups (from year 2 – 6) are interested, please ask at the office for more information.

Along with Mrs Browning working with all classes teaching music on our galaxy days, we have a great team of visiting instrumental music teachers coming into the school – teaching woodwind, guitar, drums, piano / keyboard and strings.  If you’d like to find out more about music instrumental lessons at the school please ask at the office.