CLIL Lesson Plan: "The musical instruments"

The sequence developed in this work is The musical instruments. It is aimed at learners from 6th grade of Primary education (11-12 years old) in the curriculum of music in Catalonia.

At the end of the sequence I want students to be able to distinguish among different musical instruments as well as knowing how they are classified.


Learning outcomes
- To know the name of different musical instruments.
- To understand the main classification of musical instruments.
- To distinguish the musical instruments by their characteristics and sound.

Subject content
The families of the musical instruments: string, wind and percussion:
- Characteristics.
- How they work.
- How they sound.
- Main instruments.


Language content/Communication




Key competences
Autonomy, initiative and decision taking: create, initiate, develop and assess individual or collective activities or projects with creativity, confidence, responsibility and critical thinking.

Artistic and cultural: can apply their knowledge of different cultural and artistic form of expression to appreciate its intrinsic value.

Linguistic skills: can interact with other people and approach other cultures in an adequate way. Can relate observations, explanations, thoughts, opinion and develop argument.


Organization and class distribution/Activities 

Session 1
The teacher will ask the students to look at the word cloud and write the name of musical instruments. Then, they will have to classify these words thinking what they have in common.

After that, they will look at the following presentation and listen to the teacher's explanation about the instruments of the orchestra.

Orchestra from Beth Thompson

Then, in pairs, they will create sentences in present simple about the musical instruments’ families.

To finish the lesson, they will have to classify the previous instruments again but using what they have learnt about the families of the instruments.


Session 2

I In groups of three, the students will fill in the gaps and read a text (Educaplay activity).There are 3 different texts and each group will read one of them. After that, they will form new groups, one student from each text. Then, each student has to explain his/her text in their own words with the help of some useful sentences provided by the teacher.



String instruments


Wind instruments




Percussion instruments





Session 3
The sudents have to listen to the sound of different musical instruments and guess which instruments are being played.

The final task is to complete a flow chart based on what the students have learnt in the previous activities.





Evaluation (criteria and instruments)
Students should be able to (assessment criteria):

- Name the families of the musical instruments.
- Work in pairs and in a group.
- Distinguish instruments depending on their characteristics.
- Classifying instruments.
- Understand what the teacher is saying.
- Explain a text using their words.
- Guess the instrument by its sound.
- Complete a chart based on what they have learnt.

Assessment instruments:
- Self-assessment rubric





Here you can find the complete CLIL lesson plan and the material for students.