EYFS Music Curriculum Map (Nursery & Reception)

How Kidstrument structures early music for Nursery and Reception: a 12-session route with warm-ups, Learn clips, listening games, Musical Detectives discussions, songs and extra activities — aligned with Musical Development Matters.

One mapped route, two EYFS year groups

Kidstrument’s EYFS music route is built around 12 mapped sessions. Each session uses a familiar pattern:

A short warm-up or movement activity.
A Learn clip focusing on one musical idea (pulse, rhythm, pitch, dynamics, tempo, timbre, texture, genre, etc.).
A Hear the Difference listening game to sharpen aural memory.
A Musical Detectives discussion where children talk about what they hear.
One or more Sing activities using well-known nursery rhymes.
Optional extras such as Find the Words, Instrument Flashcards / Hotspots, Memory Games or Workbooks.

In Nursery, this structure is introduced gently with strong adult modelling and lots of repetition. In Reception, the same sessions are revisited so that children can take more ownership: remembering ideas, leading actions, explaining their choices and using musical vocabulary more independently.

EYFS music curriculum overview illustration — Everything you need as an EYFS teacher to deliver amazing music lessons.

Use it as lessons or “little and often”

The EYFS route is deliberately flexible. You can:

Teach a weekly music session (for example 20–30 minutes in Nursery, 30 minutes in Reception), or
De-linearise it: a song before morning registration, a listening or dancing game after break, a quick word game or flashcards at tidy-up time.

Because the same activity types repeat — Learn, Hear the Difference, Musical Detectives, songs, extras — children quickly recognise the routines, while leaders still see a clear mapped sequence.

Building blocks of EYFS music in Kidstrument

These are the core activity types you’ll see repeated throughout the 12 sessions. They are the same in Nursery and Reception, but with increasing independence and depth of discussion across the two years.

Learn clips (Future Stars Academy)

Short, teacher-led explanations of key musical ideas.

Clips such as Learn: Pulse, Learn: Rhythm, Learn: Pitch, Learn: Dynamics, Learn: Tempo, Learn: Timbre, Learn: Melodic Shape, Learn: Texture, Learn: Genre and Learn: Song Structure (Twinkle Twinkle) introduce one idea at a time with movement, body percussion and simple language.

In Nursery, children copy and experience the ideas with strong adult modelling. In Reception, they’re encouraged to recall previous clips, demonstrate the idea themselves and talk about what they notice (for example, “This is the pulse”; “The melody goes up here.”).

Hear the Difference listening games

Spot the missing sound, notice changes, compare what you hear.

Activities such as Hear the Difference: Animals / Vehicles / Instruments / Weather (A–C) ask children to listen to short sound sequences, then identify which sound is missing when the sequence changes. This builds aural memory, attention and careful listening.

In Nursery, the focus is on simply noticing and choosing. In Reception, children are pushed a little further: “How did you know?” “Was it higher or lower?” “Did it sound smooth, scratchy, loud or quiet?” — helping them develop precise listening language.

Musical Detectives discussions

Pause-and-talk moments to think about sound.

In Musical Detectives (for example Bird Song, Bass Guitar, Trumpet Fanfare, Choir Singing, Piano, Drum Kit, Electric Guitar, Steam Train, Cat Purring, Dog Barking, Rain and Thunder, Car Horn), the video stops so the class can talk. Children guess what they hear, say how it makes them feel and notice basic features like “loud/quiet” and “high/low”.

These repeated opportunities to talk about sound support the Musical Development Matters emphasis on children as “proficient listeners”, using their own words and experiences.

Sing: nursery rhymes and song pack

A shared bank of songs that grows across the two years.

Children learn and revisit songs such as Baa Baa Little Sheep, London Bridge is Falling Down, Hickory Dickory Dock, Lavender Blue, Jack and Jill, This Old Man, Rain Rain Go Away, Row Row Row Your Boat, Mary Had A Little Lamb and Old Macdonald, with seasonal additions like Silent Night, Jingle Bells, Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer and Happy Birthday.

Across Nursery and Reception, the expectation moves from joining in with actions and repeated phrases towards starting verses, suggesting new words and noticing repeated sections in songs.

Extras: words, instruments & memory games

Quick activities to reinforce vocabulary and instrument knowledge.

Extra activities such as Find the Words (Tempo / Rhythm / Pitch / Dynamics / General EYFS), Instrument Flashcards (Brass, Keyboard, Percussion, String, Woodwind), Instrument Hotspots (Cello, Clarinet, Drum Kit, Flute, Guitar, Keyboard, Oboe, Trombone, Trumpet, Violin) and Memory Games (Percussion, Strings, Woodwind, Brass) give you short, focused ways to revisit ideas from the main sessions.

These can be used in both Nursery and Reception, with children gradually taking more of the reading, naming and explaining as they move towards the end of EYFS.

Early Workbooks (as and when appropriate)

Gently introducing symbols and notation where it fits the cohort.

Workbooks such as Musical Instruments, Music Symbols, Musical Alphabet and Solfeg, Notes and Rests, Staves, Lines and Spaces, Treble/Bass Clef, Simple Time Signatures are there when you want them. They are not a checklist to race through in EYFS, but a bank of resources for children who are ready to explore symbols, match pictures to sounds or start spotting simple notation.

EYFS and Musical Development Matters

The EYFS route has been designed with Musical Development Matters in the Early Years (Nicola Burke, Early Education) in mind. It supports the four strands — Hearing and Listening, Vocalising and Singing, Moving and Dancing and Exploring and Playing — and the broader EYFS themes of a Unique Child, Positive Relationships and Enabling Environments.

Download Musical Development Matters in the Early Years (PDF)

Hearing and Listening

Across Nursery and Reception, children are treated as proficient listeners, not passive receivers of background music. Hear the Difference games and Musical Detectives give frequent opportunities to listen closely, notice changes, spot missing sounds and talk about what they hear — exactly the kind of rich listening the guidance promotes.

Vocalising and Singing

Children’s own vocal play, improvised song fragments and different versions of familiar tunes are all valued, not corrected away. The Sing activities and Song Pack provide a secure spine of rhymes which can be adapted and extended, supporting the document’s emphasis on children’s own musical voices and creativity.

Moving and Dancing

Movement, action and dance are built into the EYFS route through warm-ups, Move Like This, Dance: Musical Statues and simple movement responses to sound. Children are encouraged to show pulse, tempo and dynamics in their bodies — an embodied approach to musical development that the guidance strongly recommends.

Exploring and Playing

Exploration is supported by Instrument Flashcards, Hotspots, Memory Games, Match the Timbre and optional Workbooks. These allow children to notice how sounds are made, group instruments into families and experiment with ways of representing sound — without turning the EYFS into a formal theory course or a tick-box list of objectives.

Revisiting, not racing

By repeating the same 12 sessions across Nursery and Reception with gradually increasing independence, Kidstrument honours the guidance’s message that depth and breadth of experience matter more than speed. Children have time to internalise pulse, rhythm, pitch and other concepts through play, repetition and talk — while leaders can still show a clear, coherent programme of musical development across EYFS.

See the mapped route for each EYFS year

Use these pages to zoom in on what happens in each of the 12 sessions, how the activities are described for teachers, and which skills they build in Nursery and Reception.

Nursery music map

A session-by-session Nursery overview: what happens in the activities (for example Learn: Pulse, Hear the Difference: Animals, Musical Detectives: Bird Song, Sing: Baa Baa Little Sheep) and which early musical skills they build.

View Nursery curriculum map

Reception music map

The same 12 sessions revisited in Reception, with higher expectations for independence: children help lead warm-ups, recall and explain ideas from Learn clips, describe their listening choices and take more ownership of songs and actions.

View Reception curriculum map