Creative Curriculum

We’ve all been there, whether as music coordinator, PPA cover teacher, or classroom teacher… How can we make music ‘fit in’ with our current topic?

Thematic planning is a great tool for learning, it can engage and motivate even the most learning averse children to find out facts, deepen their understanding, and develop new skills. However, for subjects like music, which often languishes forgotten at the bottom of the pile, a thematic approach can be problematic as it gets sandwiched into the remaining gaps.

Music suffers particularly from this treatment as it is a skills-based subject, and this therefore means that it needs to be delivered steadily and regularly. If your child is learning to ride their bike, tie their shoes and tell the time, you probably don’t ask them to ride their bike one weekend, tie their shoes the next, tell the time the following weekend, and then expect to see an instant improvement in the bike riding when they try again three weekends later! However, that is often how the development of musical skills is treated in a thematic curriculum approach.

We think about the theme, and how music can fit round that, and not the other way around. In fact, let’s be honest, we mostly think about what songs we can find to fit with our topic, and leave it at that! But what about our pupils’ composing, listening, improvising and instrumental playing skills?

Of course, schools aren’t choosing topics and then just coming up with random content to teach them. There is a thought-process around what skills, knowledge, and understanding the pupils need to develop. However this is usually based around ‘core’ subjects, and the development of literacy and numeracy, rather than around the non-core subjects.

So there’s an easy fix. We can consider the skills, knowledge and understanding that our pupils need to develop in the non-core subjects, like music, at the very start of the planning stage, when selecting our topics. In fact, radical though it may sound, we could think of ONLY the non-core subjects when we plan our themes!

Why? All subjects, and especially skills-based subjects, require linear progress, but often in our thematic planning, we are suddenly asking pupils to compose a piece when they’ve never done composing before, just because it fits the idea of (or because we couldn’t find any songs about!) an arbitrary topic such as ‘Space’ or ‘Rainforest.’ We would absolutely not ask a child to write a story having not first taught them how to read or write any words. As teachers we all have that common understanding, whereas not all of us have the same level of understanding about music, or other non-core subjects.

So let’s start with music and the non-core subjects. Think together of how our pupils need to develop their skills over time, and how can we construct topics which facilitate this. Then, and only then, let’s have each and every teacher use their expert knowledge of the core subjects to fill in the gaps…