Music in Y4
Autumn 1 - Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
Week 1
As an introduction to musical theatre, the children learnt about the history of it and where it came from this week!
First, we made mind maps with anything we already knew about musical theatre.
Then we watched a video about the history of musical theatre. We used a timeline to order significant events around musical theatre and this helped us to understand what it was and where it came from.
Week 2
To start our lesson, we kept our knowledge of musical theatre spinning by listing all of the musical theatres we know or could remember from last week’s lesson. Here are the musicals we thought of:
We then listened to ‘The Song of the King’ from the musical ‘Joseph and The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat’. We appraise it by thinking about what we liked or disliked. We also made a list of the instruments we could hear and the style of music.
After listening to the song and watching the video, we recognised that the King looked like Elvis. We remembered Elvis and his music from last year, when we learnt about rock and roll.
Next, we listened to the song ‘Joseph’s coat’. As we listened, we closed our eyes and let our imaginations take us on a journey. We listened again and drew pictures to express what the lyrics reminded us of.
Finally, we sang the song together and here is our video:
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Week 3
Today, we recapped our musical vocabulary by listening to the song ‘Jacob and Sons’ and finding examples of dynamics, rhythm and pitch within it. We then clapped along to find the pulse of the song.
We were given images from the ‘Joseph and The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat’. We used our reciprocity skills to work as a group and put these images into the correct order. We discussed what we could see in each image and predicted what we thought was happening in each scene.
We then practiced singing the song ‘Jacob and Sons’, changing the pitch of our voices to suit the different characters.
Week 4
We learnt about the story of ‘Joseph and The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat’ and examined the most important scenes in more detail. We then created freeze frames of what we would expect the actors in these important scenes to be doing and the expressions on their faces.
Autumn 2 - Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
This half term we have been continuing to focus on Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. We have watched the full musical and discussed the characters' thoughts and feelings. We then completed a reading comprehension based on the musical. Next, we watched the Bible version of the story and compared it to the musical. We discussed our likes and dislikes of both versions and then looked at the similarities and differences between them. We sang more of the songs and had a go at acting out our favourite scene. We really enjoyed learning about Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and hope to explore more musicals this year.
This half term we have also been working hard to prepare for the Peace Concert. We have learnt the songs 'This Little Light of Mine', 'Shine Jesus Shine', 'Let it Be' and finally our Year 4 class song: 'One Day'. We have loved learning these songs and the sense of togetherness that it has brought us singing as a year group. We are excited to put on our final performance on Monday 15th December.
We have also been learning how to play the guitar this year. This half term we learned how to play 'Rock Queen' and 'Jingle Bells' on the guitar. We have been using the frets to play different notes on the bottom 'E' string. Although it has been tricky, we have really enjoyed it and are looking forward to learning more songs next half term.