Important note
Please note that the Year 1 and 2 units have been refreshed for 2024/25. The previous versions will remain accessible until the end of the 2025/26 academic year. For more details, refer to our Music: Long-term plan.
Useful resources for teaching Music
Useful resources for teaching Music
KS1 teacher skills videos
Choose your topic
Year 1
In this new unit, children explore keeping the pulse together through music and movement, by exploring their favourite things.
In this updated unit, children use bodies and instruments to listen and respond to pieces of music with fast and slow speeds; learn and perform a rhyme and a song focussing on fast and slow.
In this new unit, children make links between music, sounds and environments and use percussion, vocal and body sounds to represent the seaside.
This new unit uses fairytales to introduce children to the concept of sound patterns (rhythms). They explore clapping along to repeated words and phrases, creating rhythmic patterns to tell a familiar fairytale.
This new unit helps the children learn how to identify high and low notes and to compose a simple tune to represent a superhero.
In this new unit, the children combine all the musical concepts learned throughout Year 1 for an underwater-themed performance incorporating instrumental, vocal and body sounds.
Year 2
In this unit, the children use instruments to represent animals, copying rhythms and creating call and response rhythms.
This new unit helps the children learn how events, actions and feelings within stories can be represented by pitch, dynamics and tempo.
In this new unit, the children learn folk songs and create sounds to represent three contrasting landscapes: seaside, countryside and city.
This new unit helps children with developing knowledge and understanding of dynamics using instruments; learning to compose and play rhythms to represent planets.
This new lesson helps the children develop an understanding of structure by exploring and ordering rhythms.
In this new unit, children are exploring the song ‘Once a Man Fell in a Well’, playing it using tuned percussion and reading simple symbols representing pitch.