Teaching Strategies and Approaches
Provide opportunities for learners to explore and be creative with sound:
- Give children access to a variety of instruments and objects to explore, including a selection of tuned and untuned percussion and materials with a variety of textures and surfaces.
- Percussion instruments can be organisedby timbre (shake, tap, ting, boom) to support children to categorisethe instruments.
- Encourage learners to explore contrasting sounds with visuals for basic music concepts displayed (loud/quiet, fast/slow, high/low).
- Provide opportunities for children to use materials to create different sounds and to make their own instruments. Materials could include plastic bottles & lids, plastic boxes, cardboard boxes, buckets, pots & lids, wooden blocks, spoons, sand paper, pencils, straws, sticks, rubber bands etc.
- Encourage learners to compare and contrast sounds and to describe the sounds they have created e.g. What happens if you swap thespoon for a straw? Can you use the materials to make a shake sound? What could you use to make a loud sound? How could you make that sound quieter? How could you change the pitch of that sound?
Engage learners in group music making activities to explore sounds created by voice, instruments and body percussion:
- Model use of the voice in different ways using a call and response activity e.g. ‘Have you got your singing/whispering/humming/robot voice?’
- Use songs and rhymes to model and introduce different forms of body percussion (stamp, clap, click, tap knees) e.g. ‘Bubble Gum,Bubble Gum’.
- Use different types of body percussion to pass a rhythm around the circle e.g. clap clapstamp stamp. Children can take turns to lead and make up their own body percussion pattern to pass around the circle.
- Use songs to introduce different percussion instruments, their names, the sounds they make and model the techniques for playing them e.g. ‘What’s inside the magic bag’
- Explore instruments and how can they can be played to create different effects in an ‘Improvisation Circle’. A group of children, with an instrument each, should sit in the middle of the circle. Another child can ‘lead’ by tapping each person on the shoulder to indicate when to start and stop playing their instrument. The rest of the class listen closely to the sounds that are created and talkabout what they noticed.
Using music technology
- Create opportunities for children making sound recordings and play them back using iPad Apps with increasing independence e.g. Voice Memos, Book Creator, GarageBand
- Encourage children to explore and layer sound using music technology e.g. GarageBand App or Chrome Music Lab
End of Level Benchmarks
- Follows performance directions, for example, follows the group leader.
- When communicating ideas and feelings through creative musical activities, working
on their own and/or with others: uses voice, instruments and technology to create musical ideas using sound, rhythm, pitch and dynamics
Interdisciplinary links
LIT 1-02a, LIT 1-03a
MNU 1-07a, MTH 1-13a
HWB 1-10a, HWB 1-11a , HWB 1-14a, HWB 1-23a
TCH 1-01a, TCH 1-10a
