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 put into two categories, tuned percussion (that have a pitch, such as glockenspiels) and non-tuned percussion (that have no definite pitch, such as claves). Non-tuned percussion can then be organised by timbre (shake, tap, ting, boom) to support children to categorise the instruments.
- Encourage learners to explore contrasting sounds with visuals for 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 the spoon 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 clap stamp stamp. Children can take turns to lead and make up their own body percussion pattern to pass around the circle.
- Watch and listen to music from around the world, such as samba bands or African drum music to introduce different percussion instruments, their names, the sounds they make, and model the techniques for playing them.
- 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 talk about 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, Loopimal or Chrome Music Lab
End of Level Benchmarks
- Applies verbal and non-verbal techniques whilst giving and/or following performance directions, for example, eye contact and/or body language.
- Uses voice, instruments and technology to create music, experimenting with timbre, for example, uses tuned/untuned percussion instruments to create simple melodies and rhythms.
Interdisciplinary links
LIT 2-02a, LIT 2-03a
MNU 2-07a
HWB 2-10a, HWB 2-11a , HWB 2-14a
TCH 2-01a, TCH 2-10a
