At Undurba State School we value music education and its contribution to our students’ lives.
Decades of research show that learning music can help students’ self-confidence, self-discipline and team work. It can help students engage in school, can improve school attendance and can even help students to make healthy life choices. There are also strong links between music learning and academic skills in literacy and numeracy.
All students from prep to year 6 have music lessons from a classroom music specialist teacher. Students in prep to year 3 are involved in learning about beat and rhythm through movement, performance and dance. In year 4 students begin to play the recorder with our motivational black belt recorder program. Students continue learning recorder and earning belts until the end of year 6.
We offer students from year 3 the opportunity to join our strings program, while from year 4 students are offered the opportunity to join our band program consisting of instruments from the woodwind, percussion and brass families.
We have a strong ensemble program across all areas of our music program. The instrumental ensembles are three string ensembles, two concert bands and a drum line.
Specialist instrumental teachers, who are experts in their field, conduct all these ensembles. We offer students the opportunity to sing as part of a choir from year 2. Our junior choir has members from years 2 and 3 students, while our Senior Choir is made up of students from years 4, 5 and 6.
All of our ensembles, both instrumental and choral, are given multiple performance opportunities across the year. We have an Arts Showcase each June to allow parents to see progress of all of our ensembles, and in term 4 we have our Music Awards Night which allows string ensembles, concert bands and our senior choir perform and Undurba State School Music Awards to be presented to recipients.
We also celebrate music education in November every year, by participating the Australia wide Music: Count us in program.