Schemes of Work also ensure a really enriching and diverse curriculum. They enable classroom teachers to be able to look at the whole year’s curricular map and say, “Wow, okay. So the children will be learning X this term. They haven’t learned about world music yet this year.” From our perspective as educators and curriculum architects, introducing “Music Around the World” as a Scheme of Work means we need to make sure there’s a unit which reinforces pulse because we know pupils haven’t had that element yet. It’s a new element for them and they would benefit from learning about that, understanding it, practicing it and experiencing it in varied settings.
Schemes of Work also ensure that the curriculum remains broad and robust in terms of the genre of music they’re studying, as well as the techniques or theory that pupils may cover. Sing Education makes sure that our children encounter a real variety of music – classical, pop, folk, world, musical theatre, etc. – while providing classroom teachers and the students themselves with a really strong focus for the half term. It gives the children a real sense of anticipation as the unit unfolds and an even more tremendous sense of accomplishment once the unit is done.
Never Bored Again
Lastly, Schemes of Work are useful because they provide a defined and concise period for handling any particular learning material – meaning that the exploration is for a limited period of time and is conducted in a very focused way. The learning is finite and doesn’t sprawl on and on. For instance, a teacher might take a song and learn it in week one, week two they might explore it a little bit more, week three, they’ll explore another element of the song. By week four, they are exploring a third element of the song but then they might not revisit that song again for an entire year until it appears in another Scheme of Work. In that revisited instance the song would always be alongside other things – it would supplement future learning but never again be the whole focus of an entire lesson. In this way the Scheme of Work provides a container for musical learning and for musical repertoire to sit within that is discreet and packaged up into a neat unit.
The result?
Children remain engaged with the material and teachers can communicate the ideas being taught in that six-week unit fully. They can then confidently move on to a new unit, rather than having to constantly track back over long periods of time repeating what the children have already learnt. Schemes of Work help teachers discover and share something new each time they revisit a piece of music, skill or technique. It’s always onwards and upwards rather and round and round!