At St Charles, music is a highly valued, integral part of our Catholic school life. We are passionate about ensuring all our children have access to transformational, enriching musical opportunities with the intention of inspiring and developing a life-long love of music, whilst also helping all to realise their musical potential.
Music is a powerful, unique form of communication that can change the way pupils feel, think and act. It brings together intellect and feeling and enables personal expression, reflection and emotional development.
At St Charles we provide opportunities for all children to create, play, perform and enjoy music and to develop the skills to listen to and critically appreciate a wide variety of musical forms.
All children are given a weekly music lesson with a music specialist teacher. These lessons foster pupils sensitivity to, and their understanding and enjoyment of music, through an active involvement in listening, performing, composing and appraising. There are also weekly singing assemblies which develop and extend the children’s singing skills.
Children have opportunities to learn to play a range of percussion instruments as part of whole class music instrumental lessons, as well as djembe, recorder, ukulele, samba and ‘cello. We also offerindividual and small group music lessons which are taught by peripatetic music teachers. These include tuition in violin, cello, trumpet, flute and clarinet.
St Charles has two thriving choirs and a school orchestra which meet weekly and perform both in school and at Borough and community events. We also take full advantage of many musical experiences that are available to us via the triborough music hub (www.triboroughmusichub.org), such as workshops, concerts and other performance opportunities.