What Nursery music looks like across 12 sessions
Each Nursery session follows a familiar pattern: a movement or vocal warm-up, a short Learn clip, a Hear the Difference listening game, a Musical Detectives discussion and one or more nursery songs. Over 12 sessions, the children keep returning to core ideas — pulse, rhythm, pitch, dynamics, tempo, timbre, texture and genre — in slightly different ways.
Teachers can also dip into the Song Pack, Extra Activities like Find the Words, Instrument Flashcards, Hotspots and Memory Games, and simple Workbooks when they want a short focus on vocabulary or notation.
Weekly lesson or “little and often”
Each Nursery session can be used as:
- One weekly session (for example 20–30 minutes), or
- Several short “bursts” across the week — a song before registration, a listening or dancing game after break, a quick word or flashcard game at tidy-up time.
The building blocks are the same either way: short, focused activities that children quickly get to know and enjoy, which together form a clear learning sequence for leaders and inspectors.
How this Nursery map aligns with Musical Development Matters
The Nursery route is designed to sit comfortably inside the guidance from Musical Development Matters in the Early Years (Nicola Burke, Early Education). It reflects the four strands of musical development — Hearing and Listening, Vocalising and Singing, Moving and Dancing, and Exploring and Playing — and the wider EYFS themes of a Unique Child, Positive Relationships and Enabling Environments.
Download Musical Development Matters in the Early Years (PDF)
Hearing and Listening
The guidance highlights babies and young children as “proficient listeners” who respond to subtle changes in sound and who benefit from rich listening experiences, not just background music. In Nursery, this is seen in Hear the Difference games (eg Animals, Vehicles, Instruments, Weather) and Musical Detectives (eg Bird Song, Bass Guitar, Rain and Thunder). Children listen actively, compare sounds, talk about what they notice and start to describe music using their own words.
Vocalising and Singing
Musical Development Matters emphasises that early vocal play, babbling and children’s own song fragments are part of musical development, not “wrong singing”. The Nursery curriculum takes this seriously: sessions always include opportunities to sing with and to the children (eg Sing: Baa Baa Little Sheep, London Bridge, Row Row Row Your Boat, Mary Had A Little Lamb, Old Macdonald) and leave space for children’s own versions, actions and song snippets. Teachers are encouraged to model gentle, in-range singing and to value the way children adapt and join in, rather than treating songs as performance pieces.
Moving and Dancing
The guidance frames musical development as embodied: children respond physically to beat, tempo and changes in sound from infancy onwards. In Nursery, this is embedded through warm-ups in Learn: Pulse, Move Like This, and activities like Dance: Musical Statues. Children clap, tap, march, sway and freeze in time with a steady pulse, and use scarves or actions to show changes in dynamics and tempo. Movement is treated as a valid musical response in its own right, not simply as a way to “get the wiggles out”.
Exploring and Playing
Child-led exploration is central to Musical Development Matters — from banging pans and tapping drums to inventing patterns and sound effects. Kidstrument supports this with instrument-rich, low-stakes activities: Instrument Flashcards, Instrument Hotspots, Memory Games and Match the Timbre invite children to notice how sounds are produced and to talk about “scratchy”, “smooth” or “jangly” sound quality. Extra tools like Find the Words and early Workbooks give teachers quick ways to capture children’s ideas in marks, symbols or simple vocabulary without turning music into a checklist.
Not a checklist – a rich sequence
Just as the guidance warns against using developmental statements as tick-boxes, this Nursery map is not intended as twelve “must-do” lessons. Instead, it offers a repeatable structure and set of activities that teachers can use flexibly — weekly or in short bursts — while still being able to show a clear, developmentally-informed journey in hearing and listening, vocalising and singing, moving and dancing, and exploring and playing.
How a typical Nursery session is built
Each session uses the same simple sequence, so it’s easy for staff to deliver and easy for children to feel secure in the routine.
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1. Warm-up: get bodies ready
Sessions open with a short warm-up that gets bodies and voices ready for music-making. In the Learn: Pulse lesson at the Future Stars Academy, Rachael starts with a lively routine: children shake their hands up high and down low, pretend to catch big bubbles by reaching and jumping, and use their fingers to grab tiny bubbles. They practise clapping as fast as they can, as loud as they can, and then explore quieter, slower claps — getting used to changes in speed and volume.
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2. Learn a musical idea
A Learn clip then focuses on a single idea. For pulse, Rachael asks children to feel their own heartbeat and explains that music has a heartbeat too — the pulse. She models clapping a steady beat and invites the class to join in, giving a clear count-in (“1, 2, 3, 4”) so everyone starts together, just like musicians in a band.
Other Learn clips reuse this format — practical warm-up, clear explanation, guided practice — for rhythm, pitch, dynamics, tempo, timbre, melodic shape, texture, song structure and genre.
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3. Hear the Difference: careful listening
In Hear the Difference activities such as Animals (Variation A), Simon plays three short sounds on the keyboard, then repeats the sequence with only two. Children listen carefully and try to work out which sound is missing. They share their answers and talk about how they knew — did they remember the order, the pitch, or the “feel” of the sound?
This develops active listening, aural memory and attention to detail, and encourages pupils to describe and compare sounds using their own words.
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4. Musical Detectives: talk about sound
In Musical Detectives activities such as Bird Song, Emma and Simon play a sound and the activity pauses automatically to create space for discussion. Children are encouraged to think about:
- What sound they think it is and whether they have heard it before.
- How the sound makes them feel, and why.
- Whether it is loud or quiet, and what that tells us about dynamics.
These discussions help pupils build confidence in expressing their ideas about music, use vocabulary such as “loud”, “quiet” and “dynamics”, and link sounds to memories and imagination.
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5. Song or rhyme together
Sessions usually include one or more nursery songs from the core list. In Sing: Baa Baa Little Sheep, for example, Emma invites children to sing and learn the rhyme with her. She models the words and actions clearly so children can follow and remember the song. The focus is on singing together, using the actions to support memory and enjoying the rhyme as a group.
Across the 12 sessions, children build a shared bank of songs — including 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 songs from the Song Pack.
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6. Optional extra on the board
When there is time, teachers can add a short extra from the EYFS extras list: Find the Words wordsearches (Tempo / Rhythm / Pitch / Dynamics / General EYFS), Instrument Flashcards and Instrument Hotspots to explore instrument families, Memory Games to match instruments, or simple Workbook pages introducing notation and instrument names.
Skills developed across the 12 Nursery sessions
This summary shows what children are getting better at over the full Nursery route and which Kidstrument activities support each strand.