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This website has games, videos, activities, and facts about instruments and instrument families. This would be great for elementary students learning about instruments of the orchestra.

This site is used for an orchestra unit or when describing specific instruments of the orchestra. Site provide games, pictures, and sounds.

Through support from the New York Philharmonic, this website introduces famous composers, has instrument games, rhythm games, and much more for young students. It also introduces students to some of the actual players in the New York Philharmonic.

The Kidzone by the New York Philharmonic is an interactive website for children to use to learn primarily about instruments, composers, and famous musicians. It includes games, videos, audio recordings, and text. Students can interact with games that allow them to match rhythms, sort instruments into families, build an instrument, create a graphic-based composition, and match instruments and composers. There is also information about children's concerts.

This is an awesome resource that's student-friendly and focuses on instruments of the orchestra, as well as composers. It creates a strong connection between concept and real-world scenarios. The website is designed around the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. There are engaging and interactive games and lessons for students to learn about the orchestra and test their knowledge.

Very engaging and visually appealing website from the New York Philharmonic. Unfortunately many of the links would not work; however, one really cool feature is that there are recordings of symphony performances that can be viewed in a classroom. Much better quality of video than many available videos on YouTube.

This site includes scale sheets, rhythm charts and bowing examples for orchestra students and teachers.  I have used this site with my school students and private students.

This string specific website has lots of great resources for working on different skill-sets. I particularly like this for the finger pattern exercises and rhythmic reading tunes. This helps to work on rhythm, intonation, sight-reading, and scale work.

This website is a comprehensive resource for string teachers which includes etudes, scale sheets, bowing resources, and more. Many resources are available for printing and sharing directly with students.

This website contains PDFs of music that is available for free to download in the United States. The music is public domain or available via a Creative Commons license. There is also an option to purchase some music. While bandmusicpdf.org is strictly for wind band music, IMSLP contains music for band and orchestra, as well as vocal and other instrumental works. This is very helpful with finding older music or replacing parts, especially with music that is out of print.

The International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) is a great site to find timeless works of instrumental and vocal music. The site is free to use, but membership is available. The public domain site is easy to navigate and provides scores and recordings out thousands of composers and their music. Make sure not to click on advertisements and download something on accident in the free version. This site is a great resource for educators to find musical works from great composers that are no longer in print, and they is free.

IMSLP is a website where anyone can search music that is no longer under copyright law. Here you can find music from a symphony score to a Beethoven piano piece. This resource can be used by growing student-run ensembles that wish to perform classical music. I use this website when I want to practice bassoon repertoire or when I need to find another piece to practice on piano. This is also a great resource to show students how to properly find music with educated keyword searches through a public domain.

SFSKids Classic is an interactive website for kids. Students are able to learn, explore and listen to the instruments of the orchestra.

This website features interactive activities for kids that introduce them to musical concepts. The section titled "instruments of the orchestra" allows students to select specific instruments and hear their unique timbres. Students can also explore other unique aspects of the symphony orchestra. 

The San Fransisco Symphony Kids website allows students to explore classical orchestral music. Students can listen to the radio as it describes what is happening in the music, they can explore the instruments and hear how they each sound, and enter "The Music Lab" to learn about various elements of music such as beat, tempo, rhythm, and pitch.

This is a great resource for making sure that you have assigned all of your percussion parts out to the percussionist. Plus, you can have the chart attached to the back wall of the band room and they will never have any excuse to not know what they are playing!

This is a great website for randomly assigning drum parts to a concert band or symphonic orchestra. It will determine parts, generate lists of what each student needs, and keep percussion sections organized.

EXCELLENT tool for creating seating charts and band/orchestra large group set-ups. You can label stands and chairs. Very user friendly!

I use this seating chart page to organize my students and their seats. It gives me a great tool that I can constantly update as my students change in their various bands

This website makes it easy to create seating charts for music ensembles. Quickly label rows, sections, and students for rehearsal purposes.

From the Top is a PBS series that features young performers on the Carnegie Hall stage. Each clip includes background and an interview with Christopher O'Riley (host and sometimes piano accompanist). There are representations of almost every major instrument in band and orchestra as well as vocalists, choral ensembles, pianists, and guitarists. The young performers have selected pieces in a variety of styles and some have amazing background stories, including an Olympic skater and one about the effects of Hurricane Katrina. The website also includes podcasts and a section for teachers that includes lesson plans to incorporate along with each episode. Clicking on From the Top at the bottom of the page gets you to more recent streaming videos from the show at fromthetop.org

The LSO Play website allows for exploration of the orchestra and instruments. There recordings available for few and camera angles may be changed throughout the recording. In addition, there are musician biographies as well as masterclass videos for all the instruments. This is a great tool to share with students in watching and interacting with music recordings and insight from performing musicians.

A great resource from the NY Philharmonic. Being able to see the notes that all the great conductors have made on the scores, and embrace the history of this orchestra has been a lot of fun. Also helps a lot with score study and analysis of some of the major works for orchestra.

This is the Digital Archives from the New York Philharmonic. This has copies of past programs as well as digital copies of scores owned by the Phil. The scores also have the markings from the past conductors of the Phil.

IMSLP is on online library of music that is now held in the public domain. It is a resource that can be freely used to print copies of music for use in your classroom for free! This resource is especially useful for string orchestras, as entire catalogs of music from such great composers as Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven can be found in the archive.

Over 119,000 compositions in the public domain can be found here for free. This is a great resource for musicians and can be used for research, performing, and arranging. Some pieces include recordings.

An online resource for downloading pdf and mp3's of music scores and audio that is within the public domain for legal print and download.

This is the kids' section of the New York Philharmonic. It has very informative pages about instruments and composers. It also has games for composition, and musical puzzles. You do need to download shockwave to view the content, but it's worth it.

This website is great for elementary students to reinforce the instruments and instrument families found in the orchestra. Students can listen to the sound of each instrument and watch short videos. There are great games and assessments for students to use, I highly recommend the Orchestration Station.

This page is great for younger beginners (elementary age) in orchestra.  The violin fingering chart is very colorful and easy to read.  The site includes lists of music for each instrument and performer bios.

This SFCV site is for the arts community to read articles, listen to podcast from other orchestras, and allow users to purchase tickets to concerts. Another purpose is to allow youth to explore new music that they might not know or understand yet. This website includes upcoming events in the San Francisco area, Critic Reviews, the ability to listen to music online, and other music resources such as biographies on composers and musicians of today, and from the past.

This website is a tool to advocate music education and technology to a widespread group of people, and allow readers to write feedback on the website. As well as the feedback, this site is for the general musician audience to search for resources that will help with teaching in schools and responding to young musicians. This website includes articles about music technology and its benefits and uses, posts about music education, the advocacy of music and its importance to all students, and general posts about things such as copyright laws, orchestra and its instruments, apps for music, and planning education tools for teachers.

This site provides links helpful to band, chorus, orchestra, and general music teachers. The recommended sites have been researched and are of legitimate use for educators and musicians. The sites listed include professional organizations, academic music education resources, blogs, discussion forums, and  app/software reviews.

Can't go wrong with Carnegie Hall Can create individual student accounts or set up as classroom

Boston Symphony Orchestra activities for Kids

Kahn Academy provides free online instruction in a wide array of domains. Their music section contains information on basic music reading and terminology, examinations of orchestral works by Gerard Schwartz (former music director of the Seattle Symphony), and and introduction to the instruments of the orchestra.