Orchestra Lesson Planning Help

The orchestra can be a fun-filled lesson or unit depending on your material. There are many resources to help you put together a lesson on the orchestra, but you have to be creative in your planning to keep the lesson interesting to your students.

There are many websites that can help students to discover the orchestra through exploration. If your students have access to the Internet during class time, then I would recommend doing a self-exploratory lesson with the following websites:

• Dallas Symphony Orchestra
• New York Philharmonic Orchestra
• San Francisco Symphony Orchestra

Books, with accompanying CDs, tell stories of the orchestra with a symphonic backdrop and can be read as a group or individually using various reading techniques. Here are a couple of examples:

• Story of the Orchestra : Listen While You Learn About the Instruments, the Music and the Composers Who Wrote the Music!
• Meet the Orchestra

There are famous orchestral works, which may be used to introduce the orchestra. You can play a recording of these pieces and use pictures of the instruments or the characters the instruments represent to establish the basics of the orchestra. These works have also been made into various films; I have provided links for the information on these films from the Internet Movie Database.

Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf is a good one to use since it also tells an engaging story about a young boy and his encounter with a wolf. There are many versions of this loveable tale including puppet theater, animation, and ballet performances that students will enjoy. The following are links for other ideas and lessons using Peter and the Wolf:

• Peter and the Wolf Materials from the Owensboro Symphony Orchestra
• Peter and the Wolf Materials from the Oakland East Bay Symphony Orchestra
• Peter and the Wolf Materials from the Trenton Symphony Orchestra
• Peter and the Wolf from Penguin Readers
• Edison Elementary -Peter and the Wolf

In the musical suite Carnival of Animals by Camille Saint-Saens, instruments mimic various animals through tone painting and the use of a narrator. The following links may help you to put together a lesson using this masterpiece:

• Carnival of Animals Materials I
• Carnival of Animals Materials II
• Carnival of Animals Materials III
• Edison Elementary -Carnival of Animals
• Education Reference -Carnival of Animals

Based on a Theme of Henry Purcell, Benjamin Britten’s The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra is widely used to examine the orchestra because it highlights the instrument families as well as the individual instruments of the symphony orchestra. If you are interested in forming a lesson around this great work, the following links can help you:

• Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra Helps to understand the work in more detail
• Think Quest: The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra
• Edison Elementary -Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra

The art work inspired Pictures at an Exposition by Modest Mussorgsky origionally was composed as a Piano Suite, however, there is an extrordinary arrangement for the orchestra by composer Maurice Ravel. To use Ravel’s arrangement in the classroom, you can consult the following links:

• Edison Elementary -Pictures at an Exhibition
• Pictures at an Exhibition and Carnival of Animals Activities
  

Tubby the Tuba is not an orchestral work, but rather an animated feature film, based on a song by Paul Tripp and George Kleinsinger. Tubby is young tuba who, after being ridiculed by the other instruments in the orchestra for his low and slow voice, takes a journey through many lands to find a song that fits his voice. Below are the resource links to include this tale in your look at the orchestra:

• Tubby the Tuba Edison Elementary
• Tubby the Tuba BSO Kids