Crew Shields – Music

14th April 2024Sarah Mcglone

We continued with our work on ‘The Doot Doot Song’ by recapping the chord sequence used within the piece. We used the glockenspiels and worked in small groups to create the chords needed. We worked hard to make sure we were all playing at the same time.

We then finished off the lesson by listening to different styles of acoustic guitar music. As ‘The Doot Doot Song’ is an acoustic piece, we talked about the different instruments that layer together to create a piece and how these layers can be different in order to create different variations. We listened to Jolene (Dolly Parton), Blowin’ in the Wind (Bob Dylan), Gone (Jack Johnson and Ben Harper), and Where Did You Sleep Last Night? (Lead Belly). We identified many similarities and differences.

Crew Mcloughlin – Music

14th April 2024Sarah Mcglone

We began our new unit ‘Twinkle Variations’ by looking at a body percussion piece. We had to recognise the actions represented on the diagram before performing as a whole class. We felt like we recognised the rhythm of the piece and the more we practised, we began to realise it was the same tune as ‘Twinkle Twinkle’.

We discussed how composers could take a simple theme, like ‘Twinkle Twinkle’ and make subtle changes here and there to create a completely new variation. They could alter the speed and tempo, the rhythm and the order.

We then listened to some of Mozart’s twinkle variations. Whilst listening, we thought about the changes Mozart had made to create a new variation. Some were trickier than others to appraise!

Crew Shields – Music

14th April 2024Sarah Mcglone

As part of our snapshot of learning, we looked at a song called ‘I Wanna Sing Scat’. After listening to the song and identifying some of the areas where lyrics were easy to pick up, we talked about the rhythm and how some of the lyrics only happen on certain beats. We spent a lot of time looking at how the rhythm and beats affected the sound of the piece as there were main lyrics, and then different backing vocals. It was a really tricky concept to get our heads round but we persevered and in the end when we split into two groups, it began to sound really professional!

Crew Mcloughlin – Music

14th April 2024Sarah Mcglone

To finish our work on ‘You To Me Are Everything’ by The Real Thing, we practised iconic disco dance moves to get our bodies warmed up. We then performed the initial verse and chorus of ‘You To Me Are Everything’ before further exploring cover versions of the same song by Karizma Duo and The Jetfighters. We discussed similarities and differences before looking in more detail at the tempo, pitch and the instruments used in each piece and how this changed the feel of the music.

Crew Hamill and Crew Thompson – Music

14th April 2024Sarah Mcglone

As part of our snapshot, we recapped a song called ‘Tongo’. We warmed our voices up using an activity called ‘Plasticine Person’ We then practised performing the song using a call-and-response technique. Once we had mastered the structure, we added in a drone using the note D on a glockenspiel alongside our singing.

Crew Marsh – Music

14th April 2024Sarah Mcglone

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.

Crew Marsh – Music

12th April 2024Sarah Mcglone

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’.

Crew Marsh – Music

12th April 2024Sarah Mcglone

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.

Crew Godley and Crew Robson – Music

12th April 2024Sarah Mcglone

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.

Crew Godley and Crew Robson – Music

12th April 2024Sarah Mcglone

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).