Lesson Warmups to Practice Instruments of the Orchestra

I've been using student-led warmups at the beginning of my elementary general music lessons for years now and I am a big fan! I've gotten a lot of questions about the warmups I do and how I do them, so today I'm sharing my favorite warmups to practice identifying the instruments of the orchestra and the instrument families.

I have shared tons of lesson warmup ideas over the years (I've linked the others at the end of this post if you're looking for more ideas) and somehow it never occurred to me until this year that I could use warmups to review instrument names and families. Identifying instruments is one of those things that I focus on in a short unit each year and students are very good at identifying the instruments by the end of each unit, but then I don't talk about it much the rest of the year and by the time it comes around again the following year it seems like I spend the first week just trying to catch them up on what they knew a year ago, so incorporating this into warmups is the perfect way to throw in some quick review every now and then the rest of the year so they don't forget what they've learned.

You can read more about why I do student-led warmups and how I manage the logistics of warmups in general in this post, but essentially I have a small group of 2-4 students who are assigned to lead the warmup / opening activity / do now at the beginning of class. The idea is to keep it quick, easy, and low-pressure so everyone can be successful right from the beginning of the lesson.

1. Name the instrument

Each leader chooses one instrument photo from the slide, and the other students have to name the instrument. I do this sometimes with representative instruments from each of the 4 families, or use a slide that has all of the main instruments from just one family for the leaders to choose from.

2. Name the family

Similar to “name the instrument”, each leader chooses one instrument photo and the other students has to name which family that instrument belongs to. When I’m first introducing instrument families in 2^nd grade, I will do something similar but instead of having all of the instruments scattered randomly around the page I’ll use a slide that shows the instruments grouped by family and have the leaders choose one family to point to for the class to identify.

3. Name the instrument sound

Have a few different audio examples of individual instruments playing a short excerpt called up on the computer (or any other audio playing device) and in order, then ask each leader to choose a number (so if you have 10 audio examples ask the leaders to pick a number between 1 and 10) and the class identifies the name of the instrument they hear.

4. Instrument charades

Each leader takes turns pretending to play an instrument, and the rest of the class has to guess what instrument they are pretending to play.

5. Describe the instrument

Each leader takes turns giving one hint at a time to describe an instrument without saying the name of the instrument or the instrument family, acting it out, or imitating the sound. After each hint one student tries to guess what instrument they are describing. If the guess is wrong the leader gives another hint and then they try again until they can correctly guess the instrument they are describing.

I have all of the visuals that I use for these, with the instrument photos, as well as all of my other lesson warmup activities for things like solfege, rhythm, steady beat, expressive vocabulary, and pitch letter names, in this set- it makes it so easy to just pull out the slides I want to use for that day's warmup without having to think or create anything from scratch. And you can read about all of my other lesson warmup activity ideas in this post. If you want to read more about how I teach instruments of the orchestra and how I sequence my instruction from Kindergarten through 6th grade, you can read all about what I do in this post.

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