Music - Lesson 3 - Orchestra

Membranophones? Aerophones? How about strings? Percussion? You need not be a music instructor to benefit from a packet of 24 worksheets that introduce aspiring musicians to the various instrument families.

Are the instruments in Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in the same family as those in George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue? Elementary musicians work on their music theory and their instrumental ear as they listen to clips of famous...

Show your school spirit! Class members use instruments or sing along and employ what they have learned in the two previous lessons to perform their school's songs.

Combine the study of art, music, and history with an activity that asks kids to craft rattles out of slabs of clay.

Students compose songs about recycling. In this ecology lesson, students use vocabulary and concepts related to recycling to generate lyrics for an original song. Students construct musical instruments out of discarded materials.

Orchestral instruments are the focus of this introductory presentation. Learners identify individual instruments on slide two and then read about the characteristics of six other instruments typically used in orchestral pieces. 

Is your class familiar with the tale of Peter and the Wolf? If they are, they will have fun testing themselves on how well they can identify each character by listening to the piece. This presentation acts as a quiz where the class works...

After watching a video of Peter and the Wolf, and identifying the instruments used to represent each character, class members use rhythm instruments to represent the actions in the song, "What Would I do."

After a review of orchestral instruments and instrument families, learners make their own. They listen to the song "Simple Gifts" and identify the instruments heard in the piece. Then they draw an instrument of their own invention,...

Students examine the characteristics of the four families of instruments. They read an eBook, unscramble instruments and categorize them in the correct families, take a quiz, and explore the San Francisco Symphony website.