Music Year 4
Autumn
Musical Journeys – Part 1
In this unit the children learnt about calypso music and New Orleans Second Line Music. They learnt to recognise that rhythms can be shown as graphic notation and learnt to play rhythms accurately. The children learnt how to cut up and reassemble a rhythm pattern and displayed their rhythm patterns in graphic notation. They then learnt about Mbube music and how to recognise the ‘downbeat’ in a tune and consolidated their understanding of chords and how to accompany a song using notes from chords. Finally, the children participated in a class performance, accompanying a song with chords and rhythm lines.
Musical Journeys – Part 2
In this unit the children learnt about music from Poland and they practised an “oompah” rhythm and how to sing a Polish birthday song. They then played a body percussion piece with a polka, before they learnt a tuned percussion part to fit with the birthday song, working on the correct technique and playing in time. The children then learnt about Gamelan music from Indonesia where they looked at rhythm notation, and composed repeating rhythmic patterns in the Gamelan tree structure. They will finished the unit by creating a short repeating melody based on a pentatonic scale which they played as a Gamelan orchestra.
Spring
The Young Persons Guide to the Orchestra
In this unit the children learnt about how an orchestra is organised into families of instruments with a conductor at the front. They then notated short melodies using blobs and played simple melodies that followed blob and traditional notation. They then looked at a simplified version of Purcell’s theme which was used by Benjamin Britten in his piece “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” and they composed a B Section for this theme. The children listened to how Britten composed variations for each instrument and they then worked in groups to compose a variation for a percussion instrument.
Summer
Painting with sound – Coming soon
Developing melodies – Coming soon