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Cool4School are currently offering a 2 week free trial and you can view information about subscription here and visit their website here.

About the Resource

The official Cool4School blurb describes it as

a music resource for primary schools. Top quality, accessible, relatable, songs, spanning different genres. Reggae, Latin, African, Funk, Pop, Rock and much more. Videos accompany the songs, encouraging the use of movement and dance making it ideal for performance, or simply a fun classroom experience. 

What you get is a bank of songs with videos and audio supporting resources and a selection of rhythm warm ups, all broken down into easily accessible activities. Children can learn to sing the song, and/or follow the movements and start to really embody the groove as they learn. And boy do these songs groove……

My favourite things about Cool4School are (obviously) the grooves, the quality of the recordings and the fact that you can link the songs to cross curricular topics such as World Book Day, Ghosts, Animals and many more. The songs can be used by non-specialist teachers and can also act as great warm up activities or to break up a lesson with younger children who sometimes just need to get up and move! This can be done in a socially distanced classroom (just be careful of any furniture around) or online. Subscribers get a student log in so that they can access the videos at home if need be.

Here are some ways which I have used Cool4School in the last few months in both face to face lessons and remote learning. For live lessons via Google Meets, I just cast my screen for the children to watch and hear.

• Reception and Y1 LOVED the Animals song. After we sang and danced along, we mixed in some animal songs (incorporating our own games) from The Voices Foundation (click for a free sample). Once learning went online, we adapted the 5 Little Monkeys Rap from Charanga Musical School (click for free trial) so that all the cuddly toys that came along to the live lessons had a chance to take part and dance along to the beat in front of the camera. They were mostly very well behaved….
• Also in EY lessons, the Ghosts song led us to sing some songs about monsters, also from the Voices Foundation books. We watched a video of an orchestra performing In The Hall Of The Mountain King and before we heard the music we tried to work out from the title what the music might sound like. Was the Mountain King a villain or a superhero (the topic for that term in reception class)? We weren’t really sure. Maybe there would be a clue in the music. As we listened we heard how the low pitched instruments and slow moving pulse sounded pretty scary and we used music language to describe how the music gradually builds up to a exciting cacophony of sounds as the tempo, pitch and dynamics change. We also noticed that there was a conductor and so we were ready to play along with this fantastic video from the YouTube Musication Channel and try our best to play our parts in time with the conductor. The children were so excited to be able to play the music they had just heard and seen played by a full orchestra. In face to face lessons we used percussion instruments and body percussion. At home we built Found Sounds orchestras so that we could all play along together.

My head of department also shared the school log in with primary class teachers so that they had the option to use the songs if they linked with any topic work or relevant themes.

Although Cool4School is aimed at primary schools, my teenage children and I had great fun at home dancing along to ‘The Beat of The Drum’ and singing ‘I Feel Free’ at the tops of our voices after a long day of home learning and being stuck behind screens.

There is a subscription cost for Cool4School, but it is a versatile resource that works when socially distanced in a classroom, can be adapted for online learning and in face to face lessons by non-specialists and specialist music teachers alike. I hope that the addition of more songs and warm up activities over time will continue.

The songs link well to primary topics and it’s easy to dip into other resources to create some really exciting musical projects around the central themes of the Cool4School songs, always reinforcing those foundational skills of pulse, embodying sound, recognising changes music heard and listening and responding in a variety of ways to different pieces of music.

It’s refreshing to find a resource that has paid real attention to the quality of production, creating super catchy grooves to move to. Cool4School is adding new activities including rhythmic warm ups, a great move toward supporting teachers who are less confident with leading these activities with their classes.