We began our new music unit ‘Trains’ by thinking about different modes of transport. We then listened to 4 pieces of music inspired by different modes of transport. We had to listen carefully and draw the type of transport we thought was represented by the music.

We were then introduced to the musical terms ‘crescendo’ and ‘diminuendo’. When the music gets louder it is called a ‘crescendo’. When the music fades away and gets quieter it is called ‘diminuendo’. We looked at the symbols that are used in written music to show this.

We practised a short rhythm and repeated this multiple times. We decided on a visual prompt that our conductor (Miss McGlone) could use to show crescendo and diminuendo and as we repeated the rhythm, we followed the actions of the conductor to make it louder or quieter.

Following on from our previous lesson, we began by practising our call-and-response warm-up ‘Water’, using a range of different notations and actions to go alongside them. We then looked at a short chant called ‘Blue flowing river water’ and discussed the rhythm. We then listened once again to our focus piece ‘Orawa’ and thought about the rhythm we had followed for ‘Blue flowing river water’. We talked about how we could use the same rhythm to create a chant about the journey of the river through the landscape. As a class, we identified seven key things that would be seen as the river travels and we created a short chant about each thing to the rhythm from our warm up.

Once we had perfected the lyrics for the chants and made sure that they fit with the rhythm, we practised as a class making sure we were clapping the correct rhythm as we were chanting.

We continued looking at examples of call-and-response pieces by learning a new warm-up called ‘Water’. During this warm up we used a semibreve, minims, crotchets and quavers to represent the words within the call-and-response warm-up.

We then built on this by adding in actions to go alongside each of the words.

Once we had warmed up, we discussed a river – how it flowed, what it might see as it makes the journey from the source. As a class we decided key things that would be seen on the journey.

Our new piece of focus music is called ‘Orawa’ (pronounced Arva). It is a piece of music written in 1986 by Wojciech Kilar. Orawa is a river that flows through Slovakia and Poland. The piece describes the river making the journey across Europe and whilst we were listening to it, we discussed how certain aspects of the music might represent some of the key things we had previously listed when thinking about a river’s journey (mountains, trees and villages).