Pentatonic Practice Folder Game

I love folder games!  They make great station activities.  I usually make about 2-3 per each group of 6-8 kids.  I use a zip-lock bag stapled to the folder to keep the houses in.

I made this Pentatonic Practice Game for my 3rd graders.  The pitches are houses because I use "Music Street" (a Kodaly teaching tool) when teaching the solfege members.  On a bulletin board, I have Do Re Mi For Sale (Fa) Sol La.  Students also have this in their Interactive Notebook.  As the "door" of each house, I have a list of facts about the house (For Example: Mi copies Do.  Mi also copies Sol.  Mi is a lower pitch.)  Using the houses on the staff helps students transfer that knowledge from the bulletin board to practical sight-reading skills.

I label Do, Mi, and Sol as copycats because, if one lives on line or space, so do all the others.  That's why Mi and Sol are red.  Do is white because he's "The President" - he tells the other pitches where to live (When the students are older - it is a great way to help them understand "keys").  Re and La are both blue because they copycat each other.  Next time, I'm going to have Do, Mi, Sol have black roofs and Re, La have brown roofs.  (I need to make ones for CM, FM, and GM).

The students can also practice the terms: step, skip, leap, repeat, ascending, descending.
I explain it to the students this way:
1. Ascending: movement up music street
2. Descending: movement down music street
3. Repeat: remaining on the same house or pitch (Do to Do)
4. Step: moving from one house/pitch to the one next door (Do to Re)
5. Skip: moving from one house/pitch to another with one house in between (Do to Mi)
6. Leap: moving from one house/pitch to another with more than one house in between (Re to La)
The students really understand this, and it helps later when we identify movement in real musical examples.