At Mayflower Community Academy, we're committed to nurturing the musical talents and interests of our students. To ensure our music curriculum is as engaging and diverse as possible, we recently convened a meeting with our Academy Music Council. This group of passionate students has been selected to help shape the future of our musical learning.

Here's what we discovered:

At the culmination of each unit in our Kodály music curriculum, our students engage in a simple Orff arrangement of a piece they’ve been studying. This practice has become a cornerstone of our teaching approach, yielding remarkable educational and developmental benefits.

Orff arrangements are musical pieces structured for performance using the Orff Schulwerk approach, an innovative method of music education developed by composer Carl Orff and his collaborator Gunild Keetman. These arrangements typically involve a variety of percussion instruments, such as glockenspiels, drums, and other pitched and unpitched percussion instruments. The key feature of Orff arrangements is their simplicity and accessibility. Designed with children and beginners in mind, they often feature straightforward, repetitive patterns that are easy to learn and play, making them ideal for young musicians.

Our Year 4 students had a fantastic opportunity this month thanks to Theatre Royal Plymouth and Welsh National Opera!They were treated to a special one-off concert featuring famous opera selections.

Recently, I observed a remarkable improvement in young children’s pitch-matching abilities through the integration of movement in their music lessons. Watching several children, aged 6-9, increase their confidence in pitch matching was a powerful testament to the benefits of dual coding, where they linked musical pitches with physical movement.

On a beautiful spring evening, the walls of St James the Less Church resonated with the harmonious melodies of "A Joyful Noise," our highly anticipated spring concert. Presented by the renowned male voice choir, Blokes Who Sing, and featuring our very own MCA Earlybirds alongside the talented City of Sons, the event was a true celebration of community and music.