Music for Teachers

Two training days have been planned for all schools in South Shropshire (April 7th) and Shrewsbury (April 8th) to work together to review schemes of work to support the changes in the new curriculum for music, to be launched for year 7 in September 2008.

You will receive details of the agenda and venues for the day from your school. I hope these prove to be interesting days and also times when we can work together to redesign units of work.

The new Music orders for KS3 can be downloaded here:

Link to QCA

For Shropshire secondary music teachers the next network meeting will be entirely devoted to practical work based on updating schemes of work in line with the new orders.

This network meeting will be on November 6th from 1:00-4:00pm at the Shrewsbury Training and Development Centre.

A source of World music CD’s is not always readily available locally so I hope this list of some website worth visiting will be useful - please feel free to add others.  Here’s the link

Details of music courses available locally for Shropshire teachers can be found at this link.

Why not consider an away-from-it-all weekend of creativity in a gentle and relaxed atmosphere? Details here.

Materials used at the Secondary Music Network on July 16th are available here.

I have long enjoyed the inexpensive and very broad selection of music available from the Naxos label.  The Naxos site has many useful features - try the music and movies listing.

Try this online glossary to support music groups from KS2 level and onwards.

I’ve recently been listening to music by Philip Glass, a composer who has often been described as ‘minimalist’ although he prefers to be thought of as a composer who works with patterns of sound. A recent (2006) recording by Naxos of the Symphony ‘Heroes’ is worthy of exploration in the classroom.

It uses as its inspiration the David Bowie album ‘Heroes’ - it does not try to give a simple orchestral rendering of the work but genuinely explores the themes in an orchestral texture. All the movements are based on tracks from the album, which was a collaboration between Brian Eno and Bowie.

Naxos is a superb label offering a massive range of material in a wide range of genre and at a low price.

For more information try the following links:

Naxos

Philip Glass - Heroes Symphony

David Bowie

A few places left on the music and mathematics course on Tuesday 23rd January 2007 in Shrewsbury. The morning course will explore the use of patterns in music and mathematics through a wide range of practical activities, also looking at higher level thinking and will have direct application to the creative classroom. Contact the Shropshire Advisory Service for further details.

Post-course note: The course provided some good practical composition work which has been recorded onto CD and copied for course members. Materials used on the course are available on my Digitalbrain site at this link

The course will be repeated next year - watch this space for details.

Friday December 1st 2006 sees the launch of the Shropshire initiative to begin to support the Secondary National Strategy in teaching and learning in Music at Key Stage 3.

All music departments in Shropshire have been invited to attend at the Shrewsbury Training and Development Centre (1:15pm - 4:00pm) when the strategy will be introduced by Keith Havercroft (School Improvement Adviser - Music and e-Learning - Shropshire LA), Margaret Lloyd (Head of Creative Arts - The Marches School and Technology College), and Ken Lumley (Head of Music - Meole Brace School and Science College).

Colleagues will be issued with, and guided through, the resources and briefing DVD and will engage in representative examples of the support materials as they begin to see the context and rationale for the planned changes to the Key Stage 3 music curriculum.

Further details will be posted after the event.