Welcome to Music

At Ark Priory, Music is a core part of our daily school life. Our music programme is designed to build confidence, ability and harness a life-long love of a variety of music to every child. The Ark Music Programme and Vocal Curriculum offers a wealth of experience for all pupils at all levels. As a school we celebrate and instil a passion of music within children from Early Years all the way up to Year 6.

At Ark Priory, the Music Curriculum consists of:

Vocal curriculum:

• Carefully designed by Ark Music, this vocal curriculum teaches children from EYFS to year 6. It has been customised by all the music leads in the network and tailored to each school.
• A specialist practitioner comes in every week to model teach, team teach or observe the class teacher and give positive feedback.
• This curriculum helps teachers focus on their own teaching of music and aids them to better and share their good practice.

Instrumental lessons:

• Years 3 and 4 have djembe lessons where they learn beat, cultural music and a variety of songs which lead to a performance at the end of the year.
• Years 5 and 6 benefit from ukulele lessons every week. Here they are taught the foundational skills when playing the ukulele such as pitch, notes and performance at the end of the school year.
• There are 12 children who make up an instrumental ensemble. They practise Mondays after school with a trained instrumental leader. This leads up to a performance at the end of the year.
• There are various after school music clubs that are run by teaching and support staff. Here the children are exposed to new instruments and wider repertoire of music in order to broaden their understanding of music.

Singing Assemblies

• KS1 and KS2 have one singing assembly every fortnight. Here we build school culture and focus on songs, melodies and rhythm that are sometimes chosen by the children who are eager to learn a certain song from different generations.

Choir:

• Choir takes place every Friday which is made up of 30 Year 5 and Year 6 children. A choir director from Ark Music leads these sessions.
• The choir performs on various occasions and takes part in local events and multiple events across the Ark Network.
• Choir gives the children the opportunity to develop both musical and personal skills. Working together and courage are both centralised in these sessions to reach the best possible outcomes in the sessions.

Performance based activities:

• Complementing our music provision, a weekly musical theatre club is running in school, working towards a performance of their own productions.

Cultural enrichment

• As part of our wider enrichment programme, all children will be given the opportunity to go to a professional theatre production on the West End. This may vary from a play to a musical or even ballet.

Impact

We endeavour to ensure that all children’s love and passion of music progresses every year. Each child is given an opportunity to build on their musicality throughout the years at Ark Priory, this is apparent in the performances, student feedback and teacher feedback.