Year 3 Topics

Confidence building, performance skills, singing in rounds.
Exploring The Stone Age through music and drama.
Learning songs for harvest and remembrance events. 
Learning about Christmas songs and carols.
Recorder Explorer - learning to read music and play recorder in small and large groups.
The Orchestra - Peter and the Wolf (Prokofiev), Pachabel Canon in D, Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, Disney's Fantasia
Pentatonic - notation, composition and improisation
African Music and Rhythm Notation

Year 3 Music Objectives

PERFORMANCE:

Using their voices:
  • Sing songs in a variety of styles with confidence, singing an increasing number from memory
  • Show increasing accuracy of pitch and awareness of the shape of a melody
  • Imitate increasingly longer phrases with accuracy, with an awareness of  the phrases in a song
  • Understand that posture, breathing and diction are important
  • Demonstrate an awareness of character or style in performance
  • Chant or sing a round in two parts
  • Sing songs with a recognised structure (verse and chorus / call and response)

Using instruments:
  • Keep a steady beat on an instrument in a group or individually
  • Maintain a rhythmic or melodic ostinato simultaneously with a different ostinato and/or steady beat
  • Use tuned percussion with increasing confidence
  • Copy a short melodic phrase by ear on a pitched instrument
  • Play using symbols including graphic and / or simple traditional notation
  • Follow simple hand directions from a leader
  • Perform with an awareness of others
  • Combine musical sounds with narrative and movement
  • Perform a composed piece to a friendly audience, as a member of a group or class    

COMPOSITION:

Explore:
  • Longer–shorter / faster- slower /  higher-lower / louder-quieter sounds on tuned and untuned percussion and voices
  • Pitch notes moving by step (notes adjacent to each other) and by leap (notes with gaps between them)
  • Symbols to represent sound (graphic scores / traditional notation)
  • The sounds of different instruments - timbre - and how they can represent pictures / stories / moods
  • The different sounds (timbre) that one instrument can make
  • How the musical elements can be combined to compose  descriptive music     

Compose:
  • Words and actions to go with songs
  • A simple rhythmic accompaniment to go with a song, using ostinato patterns
  • Music that has a recognisable structure; beginning, middle and end or verse / chorus
  • Music that tells a story, paints a picture or creates a mood
  • Music that uses repetition  / echo    

LISTENING & APPRAISAL:

Listening, reflecting and appraising:
  • Listen with concentration to longer pieces / extracts of  music
  • Listen to live / recorded extracts of different kinds of music and identify, where appropriate:
- a steady beat  / no steady beat
- a specific rhythm pattern or event
- the speed (tempo) of the music
- the volume (dynamics)
- the melody
  • Use appropriate musical  terms / language 
  • Identify common characteristics
  • Recognise some familiar instrumental sounds in recorded music (piano, violin, guitar, drums etc)
  • Identify repetition in music i.e.. a song with a chorus
  • Recognise aurally wooden, metal, skin percussion instruments and begin to know their names
  • Listen to their own compositions and use musical language to describe what happens in them

VOCABULARY:

Steady beat, Rhythm, Ostinato, Pitch, Phrase, Repetition, Musical symbols, Duration (Beat, pulse, longer, shorter, sustained), Texture (layering of sounds), Tempo (steady, faster, slower), Dynamics (louder, quieter), Structure (beginning, middle, end, repetition), Pitch (notes moving by step/leap), Timbre (sound quality of individual instruments)