Music

Our school curriculum is driven and shaped by our school vision, which informs everything that we do.

St Nicholas provides a welcoming, inclusive and aspirational learning environment at the heart of its community. We nurture, encourage and support all children, adults and their families to be the best as God intended. Following God’s example of love and trust, we develop resilience and creativity in all we do.

Learning, loving and encouraging through Christ.

An uncompromising focus on pupils’ personal development has made St Nicholas Church of England Primary Academy a place where pupils always come first. Ofsted 2019

We love music here at St Nicholas whether that be music lessons, singing practice, choir or choosing our celebration song in Friday’s celebration assembly and value its place as an important part of our school life.

We all feel the enjoyment that listening or dancing to our favourite music can create, singing our favourite songs, and understand the power that a great soundtrack has to build drama or add tension to a film.

At St Nicholas we aim to give every child the opportunity to experience the power of music to enhance our lives, as well as capitalizing on the benefits it gives in other areas of the curriculum. We follow the Kapow scheme of work throughout the school in order to provide clear progression.

Singing, playing instruments, performing, and composing are enjoyable, creative and fulfilling learning experiences in their own right, but research shows that this learning extends beyond the musical curriculum.

  • Making music in the early and primary years increases listening and concentration skills, and enhances a child’s ability to discriminate between sounds. This improves phonetic awareness and helps to develop language and literacy skills.
  • There is a positive impact on spatial reasoning, which is linked to mathematical thinking and on physical co-ordination, which supports handwriting skills.
  • Music-making in small groups promotes teamwork and the development of leadership skills, as well as being hugely enjoyable.
  • Pupils’ confidence can be enhanced if they have opportunities to perform.
  • Music-making has social and emotional benefits, helping children to improve their mood and relieve stress

At St Nicholas, we are lucky to be a part of Sing Up Education, where years 2-6 have a specialist teacher come in once a week to teach them music building on the skills learnt alongside the Kapow scheme. We will also be welcoming iRock into school to teach children rock & pop band lessons.

Skills of a music student at St Nicholas:

Listening – an important skill in music allowing pupils to respond to music they hear and perform.

Creativity – singing or playing music is an excellent way to express yourself as we all interpret and approach music differently.

Communication and collaboration – working as part of a team discussing ideas and supporting each other.

Perseverance – learning a new song or an instrument can be frustrating. It can take real perseverance and resilience to not give up, even though at times it can be hard.

 

Choir

Singing is an important part of our school life as a Church school – “To sing, is to pray twice,” St Augustine – and alongside weekly whole school singing practice, we run an after school choir which sings at all of our church services. At Christmas, we invite in the community for carols and cakes and each class sings a mixture of traditional and contemporary songs and this is an occasion enjoyed by both the children and the wider community. As well, we regularly take part in ‘Jam on the Marsh’ where the children perform as a group in the church.

 

Term 6

It’s the final term of Year Two, and for our fantastic pupils the last term of Key Stage One.

We promise that this term is going to be full of exciting events and lots of activities to keep us on our toes!

Most of our learning this term is linked to the Coast, we are starting our term reading this fantastic book by Ronda and David Armitage. It tells of the challenges of Mr Grinling, and his battle with some thieving seagulls! Our Geography is learning about the South Coast and all the different human / physical features that we find on our trips to the beach. Finally we also have our much anticipated school trip, which I know the children are very excited about!

In Maths we begin by recapping all of our learning from the year so far and working hard on the 4 operations; addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, thinking about which method to use and when! Here are our Key Learning facts for this term: Year 2. Please remember to keep practicing time (half past, quarter to and quarter past) as well as the number bonds to 10/20 with lightening speed!

Here is our topic overview for the term:

 

 

Stone Age Cooking Workshop

Today we welcomed Scott from Wild Cooking to our school to teach us about how Stone Age people would have cooked their food.

We began by learning how to build a fire using a Jenga style set up, we started the fire using a flint and steel, but talked about how challenging using just flint would have been all those years ago.

We prepared Sea Bass, Trout, Venison and vegetable kebabs whilst learning how to create wooden skewers from oak branches. We learnt how to cook the fish in one way, and then using bricks to create a base for our skewers.

 

Some recounts from the children about their experiences:

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History, Art and DT

This term we have thoroughly immersed ourselves in our Stone Age topic. We have looked at Cave art, the types of houses from the different periods of the Stone Age and learnt about the settlement at Skara Brae.

We have some examples of Owl’s Cave Art paintings here, we used charcoal for a more authentic experience.

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In DT we have been learning about sewing, we have designed and made our own pouches, we learnt how the Stone Age people were believed to have had a food pouch made from leather, and their inventions of needles from bones.

Here are some examples of Eagle classes Stone Age Pouches:

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English

This term we have been reading the story of the Cave Baby by Julia Donaldson

The children have loved exploring the text. We have predicted where else the mammoth might take cave baby and explored how he felt when he was first taken.

Year Two have written some amazing stories about cave baby’s adventures, we are so proud of the progress each and everyone has made.

We finished the term with diamante poems. This gave us the opportunity to continue our SPaG work this term through identifying different word groups.

Science – life cycles

In Science this term we have been learning about life cycles.

We have had the opportunities to meet some lambs and tadpoles and are eagerly awaiting our caterpillars/butterflies.

Here are some photos from our lamb visit.

And some examples of our life cycles of a frog

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Term 5

Welcome back after a fantastic Easter Break.

We hope you’ve had some quality time with your families and eaten all the Easter eggs already!

This term we are learning about the Stone Age, our literacy will be linked to the story of the Cave Baby by Julia Donaldson and we have some exciting activities in store linked to our topic.

Here is our curriculum overview for this term:

Curriculum Overview Term 5 2024

Each term in maths we give you some key learning facts, these are facts that the children need to practice regularly at home to help them become instantly recalled. Through regular practice these facts are then retained and act as building blocks for further number work which we do in class.

KIRFS

Happy Mother’s Day

We are looking forward to seeing as many families as possible at our Mother’s Day service later at church.

The children have written some heartfelt prayers and have worked hard to create cards and pictures for you all.

Thank you mums, grans, nans and aunties for all your hard work in supporting your gorgeous children.

Here’s just a glimpse of some of the work they’ve been creating.

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Book Week 2024

Book Week 2024

This year each year group chose a non-fiction book from the Little People Big Dreams series. Year Two chose to learn about Sir David Attenborough as we’ve been learning about animals and habitats this term, we knew that some of our pupils were huge Attenborough fans!

We have read about him, watched films and then invented a new animal for him to discover.

We wrote descriptions of our new animals and then the children used these descriptions to design a picture of what they looked like. We wrote letters to Sir David Attenborough and will post these next week – we are keeping our fingers crossed that we get a reply from the man himself!

Find our animals here:

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RWI Spelling in Year Two

RWI Spelling

This term has seen the start of all children in Year Two having daily RWI spelling sessions.

They have been working really hard and helping each other with their work, one of the new skills they’ve been learning is dictation. The children work in pairs to dictate a sentence to their partner and then help them check if it’s correct. The patience and support they’ve demonstrated has been lovely to watch.

Each week the children are sent spellings home which will be tested on a Friday in the RWI spelling sessions. We will work slowly through the programme to ensure that all children are getting what they need from it.

You can log into the Oxford Owl website to find further books to read online. If your child really likes playing on a tablet then you can find lots of books on the site to read on the tablet, there are also so audio recordings of some of the stories we have at school!

https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/

We will soon be pointing you in the direction of further online activities that you can do with your children to help them with their learning in school, keep an eye on DOJO for further updates