In this brand new performance-based unit - Back in Time to Popular Music, as part of the new Musical Contexts "Build Your Own" Secondary KS3 Music Curriculum, pupils 'travel back in time' to visit and explore different decades and genres of popular music.  
 
Pupils listen with increasing discrimination to a wide range of popular 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 decades of popular 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 musical genre, typical musical instruments ‘of the time’, music theory and score reading and notation skills in both treble and bass clef staff notation.
 
Back in Time to Popular Music is a fully-resourced flexible unit consisting of pairs of lessons and be delivered via several options:
a half-termly unit of 6 lessons focusing on each of the popular musical decades/genres in a single lesson (by delivering only the first lesson in each 'paired bundle').
a half-termly unit of 6 lessons focusing on three selected popular musical decades/genres, each covering two lessons (using both lessonsin each 'paired bundle').
A complete term's unit of 12 lessons focusing on each of the popular musical decades/genres, each covering two lessons.
 
Back in Time to 1950's Rock 'n' Roll contains 2 fully-resourced lessons using the Rock 'n' Roll Song "Rock Around the Clock" as performed by Bill Haley and The Comets, as a case study, where pupils learn the walking bass line, chords and vocal melody in lesson 1 and add further textural and structural layers to the song in lesson 2 (see sample images for further details).