Standard gives 18 sessions per year; extended gives 36 sessions per year.
Year 5 Music Curriculum Map
Big Rock Blues and It Ain't Easy anchor note values, harmony, groove and notation.
Short, repeatable activities rather than one long task.
Ready to teach as-is or adapt in the Curriculum Designer.
Structure
How Year 5 music is structured (Rock & Funk)
The Standard Curriculum for Year 5 is taught through three terms of six sessions. The year deliberately splits into two sound worlds: 1960s Rock built around Big Rock Blues in Autumn and Spring, then 1970s Funk built around It Ain't Easy in Summer.
Each lesson uses around eleven short activities that keep revisiting Upper KS2 skills: warming up, rhythm and note values, staff notation, harmony and chords, listening, desk drumming and performance.
- Vocal warm-ups, Rock/Funk dance and anchor songs build confident performance.
- Rhythm Supermarket (Tea, Butter, Coconut, Watermelon and Lemonade), note values, rests, Weekly Drum Routine and Musical Morse Code deepen rhythm fluency.
- Rainbow Dots from C, D, E + Rest through the full octave, Skies and Valleys and What's the Pitch? connect stave patterns to melodies.
- Harmony, triads, major/minor recognition and Quickfire Chords make chord language practical.
Delivery
Weekly lessons or shorter "bursts"
Year 5 can run as a weekly music lesson or as shorter bursts of singing, rhythm, notation, harmony, listening and retrieval.
Because Big Rock Blues and It Ain't Easy anchor the route, teachers can flex lesson length without losing the clear Rock-to-Funk progression.
Teach weekly
Use the route as a dedicated 30-45 minute music slot with a clear lesson flow.
Teach in bursts
Split the same mapped content into songs, listening games, movement, vocabulary and practice moments across the week.
Keep the map
Whether lessons are weekly or split up, the underlying route still gives leaders a coherent progression story.
Standard Curriculum view
What happens across the Year 5 Standard Curriculum?
The Year 5 Standard Curriculum overview shows how familiar activities are remixed across the 18 sessions while rhythm, notation, harmony and listening expectations grow.
Pupils move from labelling and counting patterns to playing tighter grooves, recognising chord qualities and connecting style knowledge to performance choices.
Vocal warm-ups, Rock/Funk dance & class songs
Pupils warm up, move and perform with growing independence across the Rock and Funk anchor songs.
- Vocal Warm Up 1-5
- Dance: Rock 1-4 and Dance: Funk 1-4
- Rock and Funk music videos, performances and karaoke
Rhythms, note values & Weekly Drum Routine
Year 5 makes rhythm and note values explicit so pupils can tackle more demanding Rock and Funk grooves.
- Rhythm Supermarket (Tea, Butter, Coconut, Watermelon and Lemonade)
- Semibreve, minim, crotchet, quaver and semiquaver
- Weekly Drum Routine 5-6 and Musical Morse Code Level 2
Rainbow Dots from rests to the full octave, Skies & What's the Pitch?
Notation and pitch activities connect staff patterns to real riffs, melodies and classroom performance.
- Rainbow Dots: C, D, E + Rest through C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C
- Skies and Valleys 7-10
- What's the Pitch?
Harmony, triads & chord recognition
Harmony tasks help pupils hear and describe major/minor differences, then connect those sounds to chord symbols and triads.
- What is a Chord? and Major/Minor Chords
- Singing C major and C minor triads
- Quickfire Chords and Musical Cabbage
Listening, artists, vocab & retrieval
Critical listening, artist clips and retrieval tasks keep Rock and Funk vocabulary active without extra planning.
- Rock and Funk artist clips
- Critical Listening and Music Detective
- Vocabulary, quiz and retrieval tasks
Explore the curriculum in your school
Open the pre-curated schemes, preview the activity flow and see whether the route fits your timetable.