After school on Tuesday I went up to a special meeting for musicians and anyone interested in music education. I met some wonderful young people from the Solid Harmony Performance choir who gave a great performance. As well as being fabulous singers they are also trained mentors and teach others how to sing. I really want them to come to our school so I am going to try to arrange a special visit.

I hope you enjoy watching their video.

Hi year 4,

I was really impressed with how clearly you learnt the song “By the waters”. I have posted up a clip of us singing so that we can work out what we need to do next to make this a performance piece.

Here are some questions for you to consider

1. How do the lyrics sound to you? Can you understand the words clearly? Do the words convey the right emotions?

2. What about the begining and end? Could we arrange it differently?

3. What about the dynamics? Is the volume the same all the way through? could we use different volume levels to make it more interesting for our listeners.

4. Any other suggestions?

So, put your thinking caps on. Leave me some comments. We will use the suggestions left below to create a new recording next week and then we can compare and contrast!

Hello year 4,

Could you spend some time thinking back about what you have learned during our music lessons this year? We have done all sorts of things from experimenting with the pentatonic scale, preparing songs for the Christmas concert – remember “Ding, ding a dong”? !!!!

This year we have done a lot of vocal work.

You did some brilliant work with the African songs. I was really impressed with how we were able to use dynamics to build an exciting performance.

We did some work on “Sunshine in my heart” drawing the pitches and working out some harmonies. We were able to sing it in 3 parts by the end!

This term we have been looking a music from Brazil and sports songs.

Can you let me know your feedback about our music lessons this year please! I’d like to know what your highlights have been, what you have learned and what you still want to find out.

I would also like to know about your musical life outside school! Do you belong to choir, music clubs or learn an instrument? How are you getting on? Have you been to any music concerts? What music do you like listening to?

I look forward to reading your comments!

I would like us to spend this week looking back at what we have achieved in our music lessons in year 5

Can you cast your mind back to September when we started with some percussion work. We learnt some Benjamin Britten songs – remember “cuckoo!”? Straight after Christmas we embarked on our violin wider opportunities project which ended with a fantstic performance and a group who decided to continue learning. We then had a go at a musical futures project where we sang a 4 chord progression as a class and then groups experimented with singing fragments of songs over the top. Since then we have worked on sport songs.

Can you think back and decide for yourself where you think you have made progress. As well as sharing your thoughts about our school lessons can you also tell me about some of the musical experiences you have had at home. It may be that you have started listening to some new music, been to a concert, started learning a musicical instrument.

If you are a member of choir or take part in any of our schoolmusic clubs and lessons can you also leave me your comments about that.

Final question – we have a couple of free music lessons before the end of term- what would you like us to do as a class?

I personally would like to introduce you to some modern new “classical” music as it is something I haven’t really included in our lessons so far but I am open to offers!

I look forward to reading your evaluations!

Baiao de Ninar is a lovely, popular song from Brazil with a catchy Bossa Nova rhythm. Bossa Nova is a genre that is a bit of a cross between samba and jazz. if you listen carefully to the song you have haer an acoustic guitar, shakers, claves and a tamborin.

I bet you can guess why Sing Up have chosen it as one of their new songs this month?

We will be learning the Sing Up version.

Here are some different versions of this song. Which one do you prefer?