Warning: This is a long post about my thought process in creating a series of products on TpT.  If you don't go for backstories, you can just click on the link below to view the end product.

I've been sitting on a project for a while.  I like the idea well enough, have kids cut out instruments from the orchestra and paste them onto a diagram of an orchestra seating chart. The idea was to sort instruments into their correct families.  My first version of this, while it looked good, was overly simple.  

I went to my Facebook General Music Teachers Group and several teachers let me know there is a similar activity available for free from the St. Louis Symphony.  Check it out!  It's beautiful!  It should have discouraged me because I'm working this hard on something to ask people to pay me for it and here's an even better one out there to print for free.  It actually almost did kill this project.  Then I printed it out and tried making it for myself. 

It took me forever to cut out those beautifully crafted pieces, and even then, there was no base on which to glue the pieces (it came with an orchestra seating chart that I used in a pinch, but it was definitely too small and not meant for the final product.)  I later found this blog post that includes a more appropriate base you can cut out from several shapes, but still, this project was daunting.  I would say the most time consuming and complicated part was cutting out the pieces.  You can search the web for other teachers who have finished this with their classes and the final project is beautiful, but I wanted something simpler.

I wanted to keep mine something that each kid could complete in one or two music classes.  Also, remember at the heart of my project was sorting music instruments by families. I took inspiration from the St. Louis print out and I made my pieces so they stood up.

Purely by accident, I found that I had bought an instrument pack earlier that came with images of kids playing the instruments, so I made another version (which is really my favorite).  I modified some of the images of the kids to include more instruments, but if you would like to purchase these kids for other projects, you can buy them here.

The rectangle shapes are easy to cut out, and the pieces fold down flat and can slide easily into a folder.  You might want the kids to color them first, but they don't have to.  I may end up creating a color version of this one day to make that step unnecessary.  

The final step on my months long journey was to create a version for centers.  One of the things suggested to me on my Facebook group was to create a velcro version of this activity that the kids could do over and over again at centers.  What I came up with was a bigger version of my first attempt that fits onto a standard file folder and can be easily put away for later.  I didn't have the velcro strip that I envisioned to be at the top where all the pieces could live between uses, but this is what I ended up with for the most part.

All in all, from concept to completion, this project took me 3 months. I'm super excited about the finished products and wish I was still teaching so I could include it in my curriculum.   You can purchase all three products individually on my TpT page, or you can buy all three versions in a bundle.  Thanks for going on this journey with me!