I was super excited to receive a copy of Instrument Zoo from Alfred Music Publishing this summer. I had been looking for a way to expand our musical exposure in preschool and this was the perfect tool for us.
Instrument Zoo! is a reproducible coloring book with a sound sample CD. It is divided into sections and the coloring book has an animal for most of the major orchestral instruments along with 2-3 sound samples. The sound samples themselves contain major works that feature the instrument. In addition, the sound sample CD has a PDF of the coloring pages. You can see a sample on their website.
We have been loving this! I printed out several coloring book pages at once and we’ve been doing one a week. We listen to the music clips while coloring and then switch to our composer of the month. When we finish the section we are in (still strings — we took a few weeks off), we will go to our local Marshall Music store and they will show us all the instruments that we were listening to and learning about. We also found a cool set of Musical Instrument flash cards in the Dollar Spot at Target a few months back and are using those, too.
Instrument Zoo! is $24.95 and is intended for grades K-3. I think that this is easily suitable for Tot School and Preschool. It allows the littles to participate in music appreciation with the big kids and exposes them to beautiful music and instruments. In addition, it’s very quick to do, both from a preparation standpoint AND from a teaching standpoint. You could always add to it but as easy as this is, there is no excuse from adding music appreciation if that is something you want to do.
Thank you to Brooke at Alfred Music Publishing for providing a copy of this book for review!
