Purpose: This unit explores musical styles in Britain during the 1930’s and 1940’s and focuses on popular music during the Second World War. Pupils begin my exploring songs which were popular during WWII, investigating their melodic shape and how melodies can move by steps and leaps. Pupils move onto explore how the stepwise movement of the chromatic scale can be used to reproduce the ‘sliding’ sound of WWII sirens and use this to create their own descriptive WWII soundscape. Pupils explore the instrumental genre of Swing Music and Big Bands, dancing to a piece of Swing Music and exploring how Theme and Variations is used in a piece of Big Band music. Pupils explore how both instrumental and vocal music was used in WWII to motivate troops and maintain hope for the end of the war.
 
Outcome: Pupils will identify the changes in musical styles in Britain from the 1930’s. They will learn about how both vocal and instrumental music was used during WWII to motivate fighting troops and to maintain hope about the end of the war. Pupils will learn to use the words conjunct and disjunct to describe the shape of melodies from WWII songs and will know, understand and use the chromatic scale to imitate the sound of WWII sirens. Pupils realise and interpret a graphic score into a WWII soundscape with awareness of effective choice of sounds, instruments, timbres and sonorities. Pupils will learn about variation form developing musical ideas using a famous theme: “Little Brown Jug”
 
Key Words, Theory and Musical Knowledge 
Melody: Step (Conjunct) and Leap (Disjunct), Chromatic Scale, Graphic Score, Soundscape, Variation Form.
 
This fully-resourced KS2 Primary unit comes complete with 6 fully-resourced lesson plans, each containing a Lesson Plan, Worksheet and PowerPoint Presentation with all embedded audio files (also available separately as MP3 and WAV files).  Also included is a unit Knowledge Organisers.