At preschool children will begin to explore different materials freely, to develop their ideas about how to use them and what to make. They will develop their own ideas and then decide which materials to use to express them, joining different materials and exploring different textures. They will start to make imaginative and complex ‘small worlds’ with blocks and construction kits, such as a city with different buildings and a park, creating closed shapes with continuous lines and beginning to use these shapes to represent objects. Children will start to draw with increasing complexity and detail, such as representing a face with a circle and including details, using drawing to represent ideas like movement or loud noises. Children will start to show different emotions in their drawings and paintings, like happiness, sadness, fear, etc, and will explore colour and colour mixing. In terms 1 and 2 we will build on these skills and support the children to:

• Explore use and refine a variety of artistic effects to express their ideas and feelings (Colours to feelings; recreating artwork by Brenda Zlamany and Anna Bregman; Concentric Circles by Wassily Kadinsky; Henri Mattisse ‘The Snail’ 

• Return to and build on their previous learning, refining ideas and developing their ability to represent them (CI learning)

• Create collaboratively, sharing ideas, resources and skills  (CI learning)

At preschool, children will begin to take part in simple pretend play, using an object to represent something else even though they are not similar. Children will start to remember and sing entire songs, sing the pitch of a tone sung by another person (‘pitch match’) and sing the melodic shape (moving melody, such as up and down, down and up) of familiar songs. They will start to create their own songs or improvise a song around one they know, play instruments with increasing control to express their feelings and ideas and begin to develop complex stories using small world equipment like animal sets, dolls and dolls houses, etc. In terms 1 and 2 we will build on these skills and support the children to:

• Listen attentively, move to and talk about music, expressing their feelings and responses (Assign colours to feelings)

• Sing in a group or on their own, increasingly matching the pitch and following the melody (Nativity)

• Watch and talk about dance and performance art, expressing their feelings and responses (Nativity)

• Develop storylines in their pretend play (CI learning)

We follow the Charanga Music Scheme. Our learning focus for Terms 1 and 2 include: learning to listen and respond to different styles of music; to understand that there are different ways we can use our voice musically; learn to chant musically and rhythmically; create and perform patterns and actions to songs and perform the songs that we have learnt and shared together.