We began our new unit of music ‘Musical Conversations’ by listening to a piece of music called ‘Dueling banjos’. We talked about what we noticed was happening in the music and decided it sounded like the instruments were talking to each other and having a conversation. We then got into a circle and using the box of instruments in the middle, two people had a conversation with an instrument of their choice. We thought that we needed to set some rules for the people with the instruments. 1) take turns, 2) you can’t play at the same time, 3) you can play what you like, for as long as you like. We then swapped so everyone had a turn to have a musical conversation with a friend.

We then split into pairs and had our own personal musical conversations only this time, we were thinking about how we might represent different emotions within our conversations (e.g. having an argument, being silly, being happy, being shy etc). Once finished, we then shared some of our conversations with the rest of the class and we had to guess the emotion we thought they were showing.

To finish our work on ‘Dawn’, we created a movement picture representing each of the musical ideas we had identified in previous lessons. We split into groups and each group had a different role to create a large image to accompany the piece of music.

We used the actions we had created in earlier lessons, as well as adding in a piece of fabric to represent the large ocean waves. Each group moved around and had a turn at each musical idea, only showing their actions if they could hear their specific instruments being played, we also used the listening map to help us identify the different sections.

We started our lesson again with our pitch pencils warm-up and this time we went BIG with some of our magical noisy pictures!

After we recapped our composer, we talked about what we had worked on in our previous lesson. We remembered that our piece of music was called ‘Dawn’ and that it used different instruments to create different sounding music for sea birds, ocean spray and ocean waves. We listened to the piece, adding actions for each of the musical ideas.

We then thought about signals and actions for things you might do at the beach. We had to listen carefully as Miss McGlone played different instruments and we had to recognise the action that matched the instrument.

We finished off the lesson by learning an action song called ‘Down by the bay’.

We began by warming up our voices using our ‘pitch pencils’. Pitch pencils draw magical noisy pictures in the air. When the pitch pencils move up and down, your voice does too! We copied Miss McGlone’s picture before having a go at creating our own.

We were then introduced to our new focus piece of music – ‘Dawn’ by Benjamin Britten. We discussed that Benjamin was an English composer and he lived in a small seaside town called Aldeburgh. He liked to walk by the sea every morning and lots of the music he wrote was inspired by the sea, just like the piece we are working on!

We listened to a performance of the piece by the London Symphony Orchestra and discussed how the piece made us feel. We then talked about how different instruments were used to create different representations of different musical ideas – the sound of sea birds, ocean spray and big crashing waves. We decided on actions that we could use to show each of these musical ideas and when listening to the piece again, we changed our actions depending on what we could hear being represented. We then noticed that at times, the ideas were performed at the same time so we had to make the decision which one we wanted to represent using our actions. We looked at a listening map to see the structure of the music.