Easy And Fun Activities To Teach About Orchestra Instruments In Your Elementary Music Class

 

Instruments of the orchestra is a subject that I love to teach because of the huge variety of games and fun activities you can do with it. It also makes the basis for some great sub plans for students to review what they know! Here are my favourite activities in a few different categories to learn or review instruments of the orchestra!

Videos

I use the Calgary Philharmonic’s Orchestra Adventure series of videos to teach instruments of the orchestra. These videos are great because they have each family in a separate video of 10 – 15 minutes long. I combine the video with an instrument labeling sheet (see the ones I use here), and then have students work on a word search or other worksheet for the rest of class while I help students check their answers. These videos can also make for great sub plans – I have a pre-made sub plan for the first video available on TPT here!

A video I love to leave as a sub plan is the New Jersey Symphony’s version of Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. This is a 22 minute long video, and you can easily whip up a worksheet to go along with it or leave some word searches or other busy work to make sure students have plenty to do for the entire class you’re gone.

Centers

Centers are a great way to review what students know and get them independently thinking about instruments of the orchestra. I have a bundle of my favourite review games on TPT – the I Spy games are so much fun for centers, especially if you’ve used the classroom instrument I Spy with your younger students so they’re familiar with the format already!

Review Activities

My favourite review activity is the Instruments of the Orchestra Escape Room I created for my students. You can create your own by combining some of your favourite center ideas together and making a simple answer sheet for them as well! Kids have so much fun they hardly realize they’re learning.

Instrument bingo is also a standard for a reason – it’s great to leave as a sub plan or as an easy day for yourself. My version on TPT includes a playlist with instrument sounds for easy playing, but there are many different versions out there that can work for you.

 

I hope this has left you with some new ideas to change up your teaching of instruments of the orchestra!

 

4 Tips for Running Successful Recorder Centers in Your Music Room

 

Using centers has completely revolutionized my teaching of recorder (and ukulele!) in my elementary music classroom. When I teach my recorder unit, I do alternating classes of full class instruction and centers. It helps my students work on their individual skills, their independence, and lets me get one on one time with each of them! Here are my 4 tips for running successful recorder centers:

1.    Quiet centers are important

Obviously, recorders can get loud, and noise is one of the biggest obstacles to overcome when teaching recorder.  Out of my 4 centers, I try to have at least 1 be a quiet center, or at least 2 be semi quiet centers (centers where students will only play for part of the time they’re there). I also try to place these quieter centers between louder centers physically to disperse the sound around the room more.

Some ideas for quiet centers:

·         Listening centers

·         Composing centers (I love using Roll to Compose!)

·         Worksheets (Colour by Note can be a fun one, or use a seasonal worksheet for some assessment!)

2.   Use technology to your advantage

I’m not lucky enough to teach in a school with 1 to 1 devices for students, so centers are my opportunity to bring tech into the music classroom. With one device you can do a listening center or recorder games on a website like MusicPlayOnline, with one device for each person in your center group you can have students record themselves playing and either assess them yourself, or have them do some self assessment of their recording!

3.     Get assessment time!

Speaking of assessment, centers are my favourite way to get 1 on 1 assessment time with kids. Almost always I have one of my centers be an individual playing center so students can test for recorder karate belts with me. I also like using some sort of written assessment (like a note naming worksheet) in at least one other center each rotation as it keeps kids more accountable and on task.

4.      Practice solo practice

I always have a solo practice center as one of the centers in my rotation – it’s a great place for students to get experience with practicing on their own for short periods of time. To make this the most successful, make sure you go over practice strategies when you’re working all together in class so kids know HOW to practice on their own!

 

When I run recorder centers, this is my usual layout with the 4 centers in the 4 corners of the room:

Center 1 – Worksheet or Task Cards

Center 2 – Worksheet or Listening Center

Center 3 – Individual Practice

Center 4 – Individual Assessment with Teacher

 

I hope this has given you some tips and tricks to running your recorder centers! I have loads of fun recorder activites that make great centers over on my TPT, so feel free to go check them out for more ideas!