Year 2

Year 2

In Year Two the children will continue to build on their musical experiences by:

• Using their voices expressively and creatively by singing songs and speaking chants and rhymes – This will be developed by using vocal sounds to express their feelings and chanting/singing in two parts whilst playing a steady beat. The children will explore their vocal capacity to create descriptive musical effects and sing with expression, paying particular attention to the pitch and shape of a melody. The children will prepare and improve a performance using movement, their voices and percussion instruments.
• Playing tuned and untuned instruments musically – This will be developed by listening to and repeating rhythmic patterns using body percussion and untuned instruments, playing pitch lines on tuned instruments and performing a steady beat. The children will also explore and develop their understanding of pitch using percussion instruments and how to use instruments to express a response to a visual stimulus.
• Listening with concentration and understanding to a range of high-quality live and recorded music – The children will develop these skills by identifying ways of producing sounds such as striking, plucking or shaking. The children match descriptive sounds to images and listen to a piece of orchestral music to identify what it depicts. The children will also listen to and respond to contemporary orchestral music, using simple musical vocabulary to describe it.
• Experimenting with, creating, selecting and combining sounds using the inter-related dimensions of music - pitch, duration, dynamics, tempo, timbre, texture, structure and appropriate musical notations – These skills will be developed by the children understanding the structure of a call and response song, combining pitch changes with the changes in other elements and dimensions, and composing music to illustrate a story. The children will also develop their knowledge of marking beats with a four beat metre and notating pitch shape and duration using simple line graphics. All of these skills will lead to the children performing and creating simple three- and four-beat rhythms using a simple score.