Year 5

Instrumental Skills

"Performers practice and reflect to improve their skills and increase the expressive content of their performances."

What?

We are learning:

  • Instrumental skills
  • How to read and play music
  • Practice routines and strategies

Why?

We want to understand:

  • Responsibility - the development of instrumental skills requires practice and commitment.
  • Reflection -Function - we can use music in expressive ways to deliver specific messages

How?

We will achieve this by using our:

  • Self-management skills:
    • Organising our time
    • Fulfilling commitments
    • Showing perseverance
  • Creative thinking skills:
    • Considering multiple options to come up with new ideas
  • Communication skills:
    • Using music as a way of expressing ideas and emotions

We started our inquiry by listening to two professional musicians play for us. We reflected on what we knew about professional musicians and had a chance to ask questions to Mr Fernando and Mr Kelly about their experiences playing musical instruments.

IMG_0438.MOV
IMG_0442.MOV
IMG_0441.MOV

This videos will help you to develop your fine motor skills and to warm up before playing the recorder.

beginnersfingerfitnesswrittenandvoiceinstructions1.m4v

This unit's key concepts are Reflection and Responsibility. To help us monitor our progress, make sure that we practice regularly and to develop reflection and assessment routines we are using Flipgrid.

Click on the icon below to access our Grid

Here you can find a selection of some of our best performances:

To help us develop reflective routines we have been discussing musical elements like pulse and dynamics, trying to add expressive content to our performances, inquiring into the concept of artistic intention. We used these worksheets to help us with our creative and reflective thinking:

Reflective Performers.docx
Reflective Performers. 2.pdf
Reflective Performers 3.pdf

Besides the development of our instrumental skills, we have been learning about famous instrumental performers. We watched some impressive videos and listened to inspirational advice from some top artists, including pianist Lang Lang, flutist Emmanuel Pahud and guitarist Joe Satriani. Below you can find these videos (playlist) and the listening guide we used in class.

Listening Guide. Famous Performers.pdf

Below you can find tutorial videos for the songs we have been learning. Watch the videos, play along, stop, rewind, re-watch and replay as you need to make sure you understand all the elements and can play the song

Little Bird.mp4
Mousie.mp4
Lollipops.mp4
Dinah.mp4
Train.mp4
Rocky Mountain.mp4