Catton Grove Primary School
Music
Welcome
Welcome to our award winning music department.
At Catton Grove Primary School, we aim to make music an enjoyable learning experience. We encourage children to participate in a variety of musical experiences through which we endeavour to build up the confidence of all children.
Children are given the opportunity to discover, explore and develop musical & technical skills, through practical music lessons.
Curriculum
At Catton Grove Primary School, we provide opportunities for all children to create, play, perform and enjoy music, to develop skills and appreciate a wide variety of musical forms.
We embrace the National Curriculum (Ofsted, 2014) purpose of study which states:
“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. As pupil’s progress, they should develop a critical engagement with music, allowing them to compose, improvise and to listen with discrimination to the best in the musical canon.”
National Curriculum 2014.
Approach
We use digital technology at the core of our learning in the classroom. The technology allows for computing skills to be developed by programming music, editing, and using transferable skills such as saving, storing and restoring in the Icloud.
The Catton Grove music curriculum explores music from around the world which encourages discussion about geography, history and culture, as well as providing opportunities for music and mathematics, and music for listening and speaking skills.
Students learn to sing in ancient languages such as Latin and Germanic, as well as learning cultural songs which students with English as an additional language (EAL) find particularly enjoyable.
Performance & Achievement
We believe that music enriches the lives of people, and so we endeavour to involve as many children as possible in musical activities.
Every year, all children are involved in a Winter, Summer or end of year production which allows them to showcase their abilities. These events include whole school singing; performances from the school’s choir, orchestral and band performances as well as musical theatre performance. Parents of performing children are invited to the end of year musical events.
We are very proud to be recognised as a school that embraces high quality performance - in 2019, Catton Grove Primary was invited to lead the opening act of the Young Norfolk Arts festival with a composition written by the pupils, to respond to the Multilingualism research and performance project initiated by Oxford University and Professor Kohl.
Later in the year the Royal Shakespeare Society visited Catton Grove to work with year 6 students and their performance of Matilda.
In October 2019, Catton Grove won the award for best Primary School Music Department at the Norfolk Music Hub Expo award ceremony.