Mrs Melinda Richardson
Music is a compulsory learning area of the NSW Curriculum. St. Peter’s takes pride in the ability to offer specialist Music lessons to all students from Prep through to Year 6, year round. All of our teachers have a specialised background in the area of Music, therefore enabling them the confidence to enrich the Music programmes within our school. As a result, we are seeing students with the knowledge, skills and understanding well beyond the Curriculum requirements.
The following information provides an outline of some of the learning opportunities that have taken place so far this year. Our teachers throughout Term 1 were Miss Elyse Hardiman (Prep), Mrs Brooke Gillette (Kindergarten - Year 4) and Mrs Desiree Pollett (Years 5 & 6).
It is our great pleasure to welcome Mr Brad Stoicescu as our Kindergarten - Year 4 teacher this term.
Prep Music lessons invited students to sing, move, and play instruments to a variety of songs. They have begun to explore the concepts of music, starting with identifying and demonstrating whether or not a piece has a steady beat and if a pitch is high or low.
Kindergarten Music lessons inquired into the idea that ‘Music helps us to imagine things’, utilising fiction literature to develop their understanding of basic musical concepts. Throughout lessons, students use body percussion, untuned instruments and their voices to retell a range of stories, experimenting with the musical concepts of beat, rhythm, pitch and volume.
Year 1 Music lessons focused on the musical concept of beat. Through a range of hands-on experiences, students learned to identify and maintain a steady beat using body percussion, instruments, movements and their voices. They have also composed their own body percussion pattern in groups and performed and evaluated their work.
Year 2 Music lessons introduced the musical concept of rhythm, while building on their previous understanding of beat. Students participated in singing and playing a variety of songs and chants to further their knowledge of these two concepts. The skill of composition was also explored through the use of grids and graphic and traditional notation. Students demonstrated their understanding of crotchets, crotchet rests and quavers through the development of a 16 beat rhythm.
Year 3 Music lessons explored 'The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra' by Benjamin Britten. Students learned about the four instrument families, inquired into the musical concept of dynamics and developed simple aural skills. Students utilised movement to symbolise a change in section within a piece, and refined their compositional skills to create a rhythmic composition with a rondo structure.
Year 4 Music lessons assisted students to build on their aural skills through the exploration of Tchaikovsky’s Waltz from Sleeping Beauty. Students participated in research skills, to learn about this piece of music, as well as language used to appreciate this style of music. They learned to independently recognise the structure of this piece of music through graphic representation, and to identify the various dynamics and instruments they could hear.
Year 5 Music lessons focused on the transdisciplinary theme ‘How We Express Ourselves’. Our central idea is that ‘All sound is music and can be created with all items around us because music is universal’. Students have been inquiring into the definition of Music / What is music, researching the group called STOMP and how they make music, and inquiring into the musical concepts of rhythm and duration with an intensive focus on rhythms. Students have the opportunity to perform, organise sound using musical notation or graphic symbols, and listen to a range of repertoire within the genre of Stomp. Students also explore the concept of tone colour as they interpret sound through the playing of Music.
Year 6 Music lessons focused on the transdisciplinary theme ‘How We Express Ourselves’. Our central idea is that Tone Colour (Timbre) impacts our perception of Music. Students have been inquiring about the use of tone colour and instruments when composing, what makes a piece of music and how we can communicate what we hear, and how tone colour can affect our perception and represent an idea. Students have been introduced to Camille Saint-Saens and his work ‘The Carnival of the Animals’. They have been encouraged to analyse what they hear in the music, interpret and guess what animal the music is about. Students have been given the opportunity in groups to create their own stories about an animal and compose their own music to tell their story. In this, students experiment with and choose various instruments and sounds that they feel represents their story best. They record their process and progress as well as annotate their composition before performing it for the class.
