I have made a series of workbooks for our curriculum and will be sharing them online for anyone who is interested.
We start Year 6 with “Chordal Chaos” which is basically a ukulele and keyboard unit where children learn to play four chords – C, F, G and Am. There are loads of songs you can play with these chords but I have chosen “Catch a Falling Star” by Vance and Pockriss “Faded” by Alan Walker, “YMCA” by the Village People and “Counting Stars” by One Republic.
Our children are over 90% EAL so in the workbook we also listen to a variety of different popular music and learn what the words “verse”, “chorus”, “pre chorus”, “instrumental”, “introduction” and “outro” mean. We go through a worked example (Garth Brooks “Friends in Low Places”) then try to work out the song structures of “Beat it” by Michael Jackson, “Rolling in the Deep” by Adele, “YMCA”, “Delilah” by Tom Jones and “Suspicious Minds” by Elvis Presley.
The assessment is either to play one of the set songs on a uke or keyboard and sing at the same time (challenging but not impossible) or to compose an eight bar chord sequence using whatever chords they wish to play. All performances are recorded and assessed out of four according to our school’s agreed performance criteria.
I also made a piano version of “Faded” by Alan Walker to play on piano as we have quite a lot of piano players in our school and it is one of the Y6 children’s favorite songs.
Finally there is a short theory exercise on formulating major and minor chords as although this is primarily a practical unit, we do think it is important to understand some of the theory behind chords and how they work.
Feel free to download and print.