Year 7 - Music
Singing sea shanties
Folk songs from around the world
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This pupil-friendly study guide includes a unit summary, clear notes, common mistakes, and quick questions with answers.
Unit Summary
This unit explores folk music from around the world, with detailed looks at sea shanties and Russian folk dance. Pupils are exposed to a diverse array of folk music, exploring characteristics that are typical of folk traditions, composing simple melodies, singing and performing using keyboards.
Lesson Summary
You will learn to sing a sea shanty in harmony and using body percussion.
Key Notes
- Sea shanties are a type of folk song that were traditionally sung by sailors to coordinate their movements.
- They have a strong pulse to help this coordination, and a catchy, repeated melody.
- We can sing them in unison - when everyone sings the same melody - or in harmony.
- We can emphasise the downbeat to help show the pulse when performing.
Vocabulary To Learn
- sea shanty: a folk song traditionally sung by sailors to help them coordinate their movements
- pulse: the constant underlying beat in a piece of music
- downbeat: the strongest beat of the bar named after the downbeat a conductor makes on beat one
- unison: when multiple parts play or sing the same notes at the same time
- harmony: the way that different notes are played or sung together to create chords
Common Mistakes To Avoid
- Sea shanties are songs for pirates.
3 Quick Questions (With Answers)
1. Explain the lesson in two key points.
Sea shanties are a type of folk song that were traditionally sung by sailors to coordinate their movements. They have a strong pulse to help this coordination, and a catchy, repeated melody.
2. What does this key word mean in this lesson? 'sea shanty'
a folk song traditionally sung by sailors to help them coordinate their movements.
3. Correct this common mistake.
Mistake: Sea shanties are songs for pirates. Correction: Many cultures based around the sea use songs to coordinate movement on boats. Sea shanties are one example of this, and were sung by many, including sailors and fishermen. Other traditional cultures had their own songs for this purpose.
More Lessons In This Unit
Browse all guides in the Year 7 Music guide library.