Music fosters creativity and builds confidence. It helps learners to express themselves and shows them the importance of communication as they learn to connect with other musicians and with audiences.
What will students learn?
Learners explore music as performers, composers and informed listeners. They make, understand and appreciate music from different cultures, times and places, helping them to develop leadership and collaboration skills as well as self-confidence.
Cambridge Lower Secondary Music learners:
- cultivate a joy of music through participating in meaningful and enjoyable experiences
- develop the knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary to contribute as musicians
- collaborate with others in purposeful and expressive ways through singing and playing instruments
- nurture their individual and collective creativity
- use their growing knowledge to explore and generate music that is unique, relevant and valuable.
Students develop creative skills that will help with many aspects of their future learning and development. The course supports progression to our Cambridge IGCSE and O Level Music courses
How is the programme taught?
Cambridge Lower Secondary Music is designed to be flexible so learners can perform through singing and playing musical instruments of any kind (as well as found objects and music technology). We recommend that learners experience music from their own culture as well as exploring music from other times and places.
The programme is designed to complement, rather than replace, instrumental or singing lessons.
How is Cambridge Lower Secondary Music assessed?
There is no Cambridge Lower Secondary Progression Test or Checkpoint for this subject.
The emphasis of this course is for teachers to give learners formative feedback on the skills they want students to develop. This can be through discussion, observation and lesson outputs where teachers discuss with students ‘what went well’ and how they can improve further, so that students can reflect on, and improve, their performance.
To support assessment in the classroom, we have produced some guidance that is available on the Cambridge Lower Secondary support site.
Support to help you deliver the course
Visit our Cambridge Lower Secondary support site to download a wide range of resources to help you plan and deliver the course:
- Assessment guidance
- Curriculum Framework
- Online training
- Schemes of work
- Teacher Guide.
Online introductory training is available to support teachers delivering these subjects.