>> Back to video

[MUSIC PLAYING] JULIA BRENNAN: In the second part of the resource, we're now moving on from having listened to quite a few pieces of music and looking at a few artworks and we're now putting those into a context. So the context here is looking at the different instruments of the orchestra and engaging the students in learning about what the different instrument families that are in the orchestra.

So you'll notice that we've got the percussion families-- so things like drums and you triangles in those sort of things. We've got the strings, which are your violins and your cellos. You've got the woodwinds, which are your clarinet and your flutes and your oboes. And you've also got the brass, so your trumpets and trombones and French horns, those sort of things. So there's lots of images there to support that. And there are many, many websites out there that link to the instruments of the orchestra.

Now, within that, it's great to link it into your literacy learning and using lots of lovely adjectives to describe the sounds of the instruments. So for example, a brass instrument you might describe as being majestic. And a woodwind, like a flute, you might say smooth or delicate, those sort of things. So it's really getting the students to think about their vocabulary and encouraging them to link the music learning with their literacy.

Now, beyond that what we want to do is listen to the various characteristic sounds of all of the instruments and their families in the orchestra. And we want to link them in to art. And how we're going to do that is by focusing on the unusual characteristics of the instruments and how they could be depicted through cartooning. Now we know in cartooning that's where we exaggerate the features.

So for example, you might think of a tuba as being a big symbol, something large in a cartoon. So it's really exaggerating those features, a little bit like abstract art I guess you could say moving into surrealism. The piece of music that is linked together in this part with the artworks is the Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra.

Now, that piece of music is over 70 minutes. I would not expect your students to sit there and listen to all of that in its entirety. Of course, if you'd like it like to break it up into several sections over a few days, that's great. But really, you just need to play some snippets so that they can get the idea of what the various instruments are, associate the sound with the image of what the instrument is.

There's also a link in there to Peter and the Wolf, which is very famous and a great story that matches with the instruments from the orchestra for the students to have a listen to. So choose either one of those, or do both if you'd like to. But the idea is to get the students familiar with the instruments and their sounds.

End of transcript