Purpose: In this performance-based unit, pupils ‘travel back in time’ to visit and explore different periods of popular musical history.  Pupils listen with increasing discrimination to a wide range of music from great composers and musicians, different genres and styles and from different times and places.  
 
Pupils perform accessible pieces of popular music from different periods of musical history, in both solo and ensemble contexts, with an awareness of effective performance technique including stylistic manipulation of the elements of music suitable to that period of popular music, typical popular musical instruments ‘of the time’ and music theory.  
 
Outcome: Pupils develop a deepening understanding of the popular music that they perform and to which they listen, and its history.  They develop effective performance techniques in both solo and ensemble contexts with a deepening awareness of different popular historical musical styles and genres.  Pupils develop a knowledge and understanding of the popular musical instruments of the period and how the Elements of Music were used.  They also develop their score reading and notation skills in both treble and bass clef staff notation.  
 
This fully-resourced KS3 Secondary 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).