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Children like games. They find it easy to play with toys, building blocks, and puppets. Children require an experience of creative play with music to enhance their understanding of musical concepts. This website's sketch pad and rhythm band games foster children's understanding of pitch, rhythm, and melody. Aural listening is a good tool for children to understand music. By listening, they get an experience of how an instrument sounds, what pitch sounds high or low, and how a melody sounds. This enhances their musicianship before they get into the details of these aspects of music.

MusicTheory.net is a great website to teach theory to students. It has lessons on a variety of topics, interactive exercises to support the theory topics, and tools that could be used in conjunction with other activities in the classroom. There are also apps available for devices. The best part is that the exercises can be customized (scroll down to the bottom of the exercise or tools pages) with a permanent link so that students can take quizzes or have additional practice for specifics without having to change the settings for themselves. For example, note identification can be customized to the clef and range of a specific instrument and sent to those students for practice or quizzes.

This website introduces us to the genre and insruments of Balanise Gamelan. The website contains information on the instruments, culture, and beliefs of the Gamelan tradition

This website has access to many professional musicians showcasing their talents through the New World Symphony. They have videos with specific instrumental instruction. If I wanted to show a private bassoon student a website where they can listen to many players, they can access this site and simply search bassoon and listen to famous solos such as The Rite of Spring. This is a great resource to demonstrate what professional musicians sound like in order for them to practice and mimic these sounds.

I'm a Choir Director: With close to 25,000 members, this is the largest group that I am a member of on Facebook. I highly recommend joining this group, even if you strictly teach instrumental music as I do, for the great shared content (updates in the vocal world and additional resources).

West Rowan High School has proved scale sheets for each instrument at different levels of ability. This source provides easy to read full range scale sheets for students practice their scales with. For younger students, one octave scale sheets are available to begin practicing their scales without the extra notes they do not know how to play yet.

This website has a series of games meant for younger children to understand sound, rhythm, mood, and sounds of the orchestra. I would use this in my beginning band classes, even though it's middle school, just to ensure that they understand instrument sounds.

Engaging set of activities for young students. Various aural and theory-based games designed to entertain and educate.

Large selection of ear training games that each specifically focus on one aspect of listening (pitch, voice matching, instrumentation, chords, etc.) Some are free, some are free with creating an account, and many have more levels that can be paid for. This site also has ear training "courses" to help improve this musical skill.

This website offers a multitude of resources designed for music-making. This specific organization is devoted to offering musical programs to students who are in the 80% of the population that are not involved in performing ensembles. It offers curriculum, lesson plans, and interactive activities for guitar, piano, drums, bass, ukulele, composition, voice and more. There are free PDF songbooks and lesson plans that are connected to the program, that are extremely helpful towards teacher and student interest. The best part of the program is that the majority of the music is examples that students know already - a lot of pop, rock, and even hip-hop. It connects the bridge between traditional musical concepts with music of today.

Little Kids Rock has a multitude of resources for creating a modern band in your classroom. There are songs loaded on the website that include tab for ukulele, guitar, and bass. There are also drum set patterns included. This website serves to expose educators and students modern band and provides lesson plans to go along with the popular songs. Little Kids Rock also provides workshops on how to effectively teach a modern band program.

This website offers many lessons for instruments that students may be interested in playing (piano, guitar, songwriting, drums,etc). The website offers video lessons as well as current play-along songs for students to put their newly learned skills to work.

This website provides free blank sheet music for any ensemble you could ever need.  This is perfect for your beginning composers.  You never have to buy sheet music again! 

This is a quick way of printing out sheet music for students. If students want to print out sheet music at home, they can use this website. This helps encourage students to work on compositional skills. It has different pre-sets for different instruments.

This is a great resource for music educators that shares thousands of free works of music. Educators can access thousands of compositions along with translations. Many of these compositions are no longer in print.

This website offers many free choral pieces that can be used in the classroom. It assists in a budget-friendly way for performance classrooms to still have repertoire available.

The purpose of this resource is to categorize and house a large quantity of choral music. As a resource this site could be used to find a range of music for performances, warm up exercise, chorales and instrumental playing. The options for voicing and parts in very broad which makes the amount of music available vast. When searching composers, it is best to know specifics as some composers share similar surnames.

For those to whom the trombone is not a principal instrument, the question of slide positions can be a challenge when teaching beginner students. This website provides a helpful listing of slide position charts for a wide range of the trombone family.

This software is a easy way for students to make, create, compose, their own music. The purpose of this source would be to help student come up with creative ways to make music, using a famous interface call Ableton push. It makes it easy for the composer to create loops, and other things using this software. It comes with many features, like effects, vocals, built in instruments, and loops. There is more than enough tools for the composer to use, to create different types of music.

This website provides a multitude of tools for music teachers, among other subjects. The website contains lesson plans and teaching strategies for grades K-12. There are lessons on world music, on instruments (such as building instruments), as well as the history of musical genres. The free version is limited, but the premium version is fairly inexpensive.

Resource for UF Masters of Music Education. This site is helpful in planning lessons for application of new ideas. I love that it has something to offer every teacher from grades K-12.

I use this website sometimes to help out with some of my lesson plans if I'm in need of worksheets to help back up the topic that is chosen for that particular week. This is good for any teacher because it provides a variety of different worksheets for many topics.

This set of music books is completely free and in PDF format. In addition to that, there are videos that you can show in class or have your students view on their own at home. This is a great resource for a beginning band program that does not have a large budget. All resources are free to use, and it is based in solfege so it is easier to teach a whole room of beginners on different instruments.

This website has free arrangements of band music, written with beginning bands and band programs with low budgets in mind. Pieces can be downloaded as PDFs and you can download the condensed score, as well as individual parts for all of the instruments. Pieces are rated so it is easy to find music that will work for your students.

Crocodile River Music is a group based in Worcester, MA, the city where I teach. They provide students with a chance to not only listen to, but also to take part in a world music experience. They run programs to come into schools and teach about music from Africa, while also having students come up and try some of the instruments.

The Army Field Band provides a free jazz resource to the public. It is called Perspectives: Resources for Jazz Education. They provide royalty free big band charts from grade 1 through 6. They also have posters and other multimedia resources that include videos, education reference recordings, and a video series on the history of the big band and the individual instruments roll in the band.

SmartMusic has interactive, web-based editions of many popular instrumental, band, chorus, and orchestra method books, as well as a massive collection of sheet music. Students can listen, loop, record and submit pieces they are working on. A neat feature of SmartMusic is that students can click on a single note and hear how it is supposed to sound, and how to finger that note on their instrument. Students can adjust tempo, play with a metronome, use a tuner to check pitch, and more. A paid subscription allows teachers to create online classrooms for assigning and assessing work, and have access to the entire SmartMusic catalog.

SmartMusic is music learning software for music teachers and students. It makes music learning easy and fun. Students can continue their learning outside school. Teachers can also assess students outside the school wall. Smart music is good for rehearsals because a student can rehearse at home when the teacher is listening in and correcting him/her from anywhere else. It is easy to access and a good resource for music classes.

The purpose of the resource is for student and teacher practice/classroom tools. The content included in this source is a subscription to a web-based service that allows students and educators access to sight-reading material, repertoire accompaniments, and method books. Could be useful for encouraging student practice

Instrument family worksheets and activities