Our new unit of music is called ‘ Charlie Chaplin’. We began by looking at the duration of a note. Duration is the length of the note. We were introduced to quavers and semibreves and we looked at how these notes would be written on a musical score. Each symbol looked different and therefore showed us how long to hold the note for.

We then played a game where we had to create long and short sounds whilst moving our hands to match the length of note.

Once we had discussed long and short notes, we looked at our collection of untuned percussion instruments and decided as a crew which instruments we thought would make only short notes, only long notes, and those that could be played in a way to create both notes and we sorted them into piles.

We then watched a short clip of a Charlie Chaplin scene (The lion’s cage) from his film ‘The circus’. After discussing Charlie Chaplin and what he was famous for, we watched the clip without sound so that we could focus on the story being told. Once we had discussed the key events from the clip, we watched it again, this time thinking about things that could be represented with a short sound, and then again to identify things that could be represented with a long sound.

Using the instruments we had separated, we began to think about the short and long notes that could be used to show various parts of the clip whilst also thinking about whether certain instruments would be appropriate to represent certain parts of the clip.

To finish our work on ‘Swing-a-long’ we worked with our partners to move in time to the music, identifying 2 and 3-time beats. We then built on this by thinking of other ways to travel and move around the classroom (for example: jogging, skipping). We practised with our partner and then thought about changing the lyrics to match the movement. We spent a lot of time perfecting our routines before performing them to the rest of the crew.

As we continued with our work on ‘Swing-a-long’, we felt the 2-time and 3-time beats by moving along to the music only this time instead of doing so alone, we had to stay in time with a partner too! This added a little bit of challenge as we had to not only think about staying in time with the music, but also another person!

We then practised using 2 and 3-time beats by creating our own rhythms with a partner. The rest of the crew then had to listen and watch carefully as we performed our rhythms to decide whether it was a 2-beat or 3-beat rhythm.

We began our new unit ‘Swing-a-long with Shostakovich’ by listening to the piece of music and moving using a swaying motion. We tried to keep in time to the beat, thinking about not moving too fast or too slow. We chanted 1, 2, 3 as we did it to try and keep us in time. We discussed that this was called a 3-time beat.

In the second section of the song, the beat changes slightly. To show this, we tapped our knees on 1, then clapped our hands on 2. We found out this was called a 2-time beat.

We talked about the composer of this piece and how Dmitri Shostakovich was a famous composer who wrote jazz suites made up of dances. One piece called ‘Polka’ has a 2-time beat, whereas the ‘Waltz’ has a 3-time beat. We listened to both pieces and counted out loud to recognise the difference in beats, before we began to move our bodies to both beats.

We then became musical detectives and looked at how you could create 2-beat and 3-beat rhythms using body percussion. We listened to a selection of short pieces of music and used body percussion to help us decide whether the piece has a 2-time beat or a 3-time beat. We were really good at this and it shows we have a good ear for recognising patterns in music!