Teaching Strategies and Approaches
Exploring sound
Provide learners with opportunities to explore sounds created by voice, body, instruments and objects through child-led play and adult directed group music activities. See strategies and approaches for EXA 1-17a
Following performance directions
- Agree signals (and use visuals) for start/stop, louder/quieter, faster/slower and give the children opportunities to practicefollowing a leader when making sound with their voices, body percussion, instruments or objects.
- Give children opportunities to lead others using simple signals as performance directions (e.g. gestures for start/stop, crescendo/diminuendo).
- Support children to create graphic scores using simple shapes/symbols/pictures to represent sounds they created for a soundscape or sound story. An adult or child can lead the performance of a composition by pointing to different parts of the graphic score and everyone else follows their direction.
- Give children opportunities to apply their knowledge of notation by writing down simple rhythms that they create using stick notation.
Responding to a stimulus
- Listen to live sounds in a local environment (e.g. park, playground, street) or a pre-recorded sounds from other environments (e.g. under the sea or thunderstorm) and prompt responses from the children by asking questions e.g. What sounds can you hear? Which sounds are loud/quiet? How would you describe the atmosphere and why?
- Use this as inspiration for the children to create a group soundscape using a combination of voices, instruments, body percussion and objects which reflects the chosen environment. Children can perform the improvised soundscape following a leader’s signals for when to start/stop or get louder/quieter.
- Similarly, an engaging and interesting image or film clip of an environment could also be used to stimulate the improvised soundscape.
- Ask learners to create and perform sounds to enhance the retelling of a story e.g. Jack and the Beanstalk. Children can work in pairs or small groups to create a sounds to match a characters and events in the story using a combination of voice, instruments, body percussion, objects and music technology (recorded sound effects).
- Groups can present the sounds they have created and should explain their choice of instrument/voice and use of tempo and dynamics etc., whilst other members of the class provide feedback.
- Provide opportunities for children to record compositions and perform sound stories/soundscapes they to an audience.
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, for example, by creating a soundscape or by adding tuned/untuned percussion to enhance a story or a song. - Shares views and listens appropriately to views of others, suggesting what works well and what could be improved in their own and others’ work, using some music vocabulary.
Interdisciplinary links
LIT 1-01a, LIT 1-02a, LIT 1-09a, ENG 1-19a, ENG 1-31a
HWB 1-10a, HWB 1-11a , HWB 1-14a
TCH 1-01a, TCH 1-10a
