There are a lot of instruments in an orchestra.
Violins and violas. Oboes and bassoons. Trumpets and trombones. Timpani, xylophones, French horns…
For elementary students, learning all those names—and remembering which instrument belongs in which family—can quickly turn into a giant vocabulary lesson.
But the orchestra is truly anything but boring…
It’s loud. It’s dramatic. It’s sometimes delicate and beautiful, sometimes enormous and thunderous. And every instrument has its own sound and personality.
So when I teach the orchestra, I like activities that let students see it, hear it, and interact with what they’re learning.
Here are some of my favorite ways to make an orchestra unit feel less like memorizing instruments and more like discovering them!
1. Turn Instrument Identification Into a Listening Challenge
One of the most important things students can learn about orchestra instruments isn’t what they look like.
It’s what they sound like.
Can they hear the difference between a flute and a clarinet?
A trumpet and a trombone?
A violin and a cello?
That’s where listening games become especially fun!
Instead of showing students an instrument and asking them to name it, turn the question around:
What instrument do you hear?
Play the sound and let students guess.
Suddenly they’re listening for clues:
Is it high or low? Bright or mellow? Does it sound like a string? Could that be brass?
My Jeopardy-style Orchestra Instruments Game Show turns this into a full-class competition. Students choose from Strings, Woodwinds, Brass, Percussion, and Keyboard categories and listen to actual instrument sounds to identify what they hear.
And because the questions get progressively more valuable, suddenly identifying a bassoon isn’t just identifying a bassoon.
It’s a question worth 800 points!!
Much more exciting.
2. Play Orchestra Instrument Bingo
Bingo is one of my favorite formats for instrument review because in order to play, every student has to listen carefully.
“Great review for instrument unit! I had never heard my 5th graders more silent as I picked the next instrument.” -Cecilia C.
Call an instrument, show an instrument, or -my favorite – play the instrument sound!
My Orchestra Instrument Bingo incorporates instrument identification into a familiar game students already understand. It works especially well after students have had some initial exposure to the orchestra families and are ready for lots of repeated practice without it feeling like repeated practice.
That’s really the magic of a good review game.
They’re practicing the same skill over and over.
They just don’t particularly care that they’re practicing because they’re trying to get BINGO.
(Oh, and acoustic recordings are included for every instrument! If you’re a busy teacher, you have better things to do than go hunting around for recordings!)
3. Go Beyond “What Instrument Is This?”
Once students know the basic orchestra instruments, there’s so much more interesting stuff to explore.
Why does a trumpet sound different from a violin?
How does a string player change pitch?
What actually makes a woodwind a woodwind?
And what exactly is that conductor doing up there?
My Orchestra Sounds Game Show was designed for this next step.
Rather than simply identifying instruments, students explore the sounds and characteristics of strings, woodwinds, brass, percussion, and the conductor.
I especially like this kind of game because it moves students from:
“That’s a trombone.”
to:
“I understand something about how a trombone works and why it sounds the way it does.”
That’s a much richer understanding of the orchestra.
4. Let Them Discover the Weird Stuff
This may be my favorite part.
The orchestra has some great trivia.
Conductors. First-chair musicians. Orchestra history. World records. Strange stories.
These are the little details students remember.
That’s why I created my Orchestra Trivia Game Show around categories including The Conductor, First Chair, Orchestra World Records, Orchestra History, and Orchestra Instruments.
One question, for example, introduces students to the rather unfortunate story of conductor Jean-Baptiste Lully, who conducted by pounding a large stick on the floor—and accidentally struck his own foot.
It’s bizarre.
And I can almost guarantee students are going to remember it.
Those unexpected stories give students a glimpse of the orchestra as something with an actual history and culture—not just four instrument families printed on a worksheet.
5. Make Review Feel Like a Real Game Show
This is why I recently put my three orchestra game shows together into an Orchestra Game Show Bundle.
I wanted them to feel like an educational competition, not PowerPoint quizzes pretending to be games.
Students divide into teams.
They choose a category.
They choose a dollar amount.
The question appears.
They debate the answer.
Then comes the moment of truth.
And the scoreboard is built directly into the game, so the teacher doesn’t have to keep stopping to calculate points somewhere else.
There are even surprises hidden in the games—including a surprise Marshmallow Man hidden on one of the slide – who can suddenly double a team’s score…or double-subtract it.
Those little elements don’t change the learning objective. But they do change how fun learning can be!
The Orchestra Is Made for Listening
Ultimately, that’s what I want students to take away from an orchestra unit.
I don’t just want them to memorize:
violin = strings
clarinet = woodwinds
trumpet = brass
I want them to start recognizing those instruments when they hear music.
I want a student to hear a solo somewhere months later and think:
Wait…is that an oboe?
Because once they start listening for individual instruments, an orchestra stops sounding like one giant mass of sound.
They begin hearing the musicians inside it.
And that’s when learning the orchestra gets really interesting for kids.
Ready to Play?
Bring all three games into your orchestra unit.