The rows below show how your mapped Year 3 and Year 4 activities combine to cover the Key Stage 2 music
aims at Lower KS2 level.
Play and perform in solo and ensemble contexts, using their voices and playing musical instruments with increasing accuracy, fluency, control and expression (Lower KS2 focus)
In both Year 3 and Year 4, pupils sing and move every term and use the desk (and, where chosen,
ukuleles) to rehearse simple band-style parts. Performances move from supported “watch and copy”
to more independent karaoke, with children increasingly aware of timing, balance and expression.
Improvise and compose music for a range of purposes using the interrelated dimensions of music (Lower KS2 focus)
Improvisation and composition at Lower KS2 are small and practical: pupils adapt rhythm and pitch
patterns, invent answers to musical “questions” and experiment with dynamics and tempo within
clear jazz and Rock and Roll structures.
Key activity families:
Copy Cat – Blues/Jazz (creating new responses using swing rhythms);
Rhythmic Pyramid and Weekly Drum Routine variations where pupils create their own bar patterns;
Musical Morse Code Level 1 “secret messages” and responses;
Skies and Valleys for designing pitch contours;
Quickfire Chords and Harmony: What is a Chord? as a foundation for simple
chord-choice work; small-group arrangements of desk-drumming or ukulele parts under the project
songs. The interrelated dimensions (duration, pitch, dynamics, tempo, texture and timbre) are
always present but introduced in manageable steps.
Listen with attention to detail and recall sounds with increasing aural memory (Lower KS2 focus)
Lower KS2 lessons constantly ask pupils to notice, copy and remember musical ideas. They echo
rhythms and melodies, spot changes within tracks and recall features of jazz and Rock and Roll
recordings across a term.
Key activity families:
Music Detective: Jazz / Rock and Roll;
Critical Listening: New Orleans Jazz and
Critical Listening: Rock N Roll;
Skies and Valleys 1–6;
Musical Morse Code Level 1 (encoding/decoding at speed);
Rhythmic Pyramid and Weekly Drum Routine exercises where pupils must remember multi-step patterns;
repeated encounters with
New Orleans Stomp and
I Love You So so riffs, grooves
and structures become familiar and recallable.
Use and understand staff and other musical notations (Lower KS2 focus)
Staff notation is introduced clearly in Year 3 and revisited in Year 4 so pupils learn what the
stave, clefs, barlines, time signatures, note values and simple chords look like – and how these
symbols link to the music they are performing.
Key activity families:
What is a Stave?,
What are Barlines?,
What are Clefs?,
What is a Time Signature?,
How to Feel Time Signatures?,
Dynamic Markings;
Sight Reading (stave, treble clef, notes C–E);
Rainbow Dots 4–5 (parts 1–3);
Long and Short Notes – C and D;
Harmony: What is a Chord? and
Quickfire Chords variations 1–6;
plus written follow-up options in
Workbooks and Professor
Duncan music theory clips.
Appreciate and understand a wide range of high-quality live and recorded music drawn from different traditions and from great composers and musicians (Lower KS2 focus)
Within Lower KS2, pupils explore two historically important styles in depth:
New Orleans jazz and 1950s Rock and Roll. They hear these
styles through high-quality recordings, artist focus clips and the class songs, starting to
recognise how different traditions use rhythm sections, melody and harmony.
Key activity families:
Critical Listening and Music Detective tasks in jazz and Rock and Roll;
style overview clips such as What is Jazz? and What is Rock and Roll?;
instrument-role clips (Guitar/Bass/Keyboard/Drums/Vocals in Jazz and Rock and Roll);
artist-focus clips on Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Sydney Bechet, Fats Waller, Josephine Baker,
James P Johnson, Wanda Jackson, Etta James, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly and Little Richard.
These lay the groundwork for the broader stylistic range covered across the full KS2 journey.
Develop an understanding of the history of music (Lower KS2 focus)
Lower KS2 makes it clear that jazz and Rock and Roll are from different times and places. Pupils
learn that 1920s New Orleans jazz and 1950s Rock and Roll sit at different points on a musical
timeline and that each style has key figures, instruments and venues.
Key activity families:
What is Jazz? and New Orleans artist clips;
What is Rock and Roll? and 1950s artist clips;
instrument and band-role videos that show how ensembles changed between the 1920s and 1950s;
retrieval tasks (for example in
Find the Words and
relevant
Workbooks) that revisit style names, periods and
key musicians. The move from Year 3 jazz to Year 4 Rock and Roll gives a clear, age-appropriate
bridge into talking about music changing over time.
