I'm about to present tika-tika with my 3rd graders and this is one of my favorite songs for this rhythmic concept.  I learned it from Christopher Roberts at a ROCKE workshop in 2002(?!).

Here's some of the reasons I love it: first of all, it's in Spanish so it's multi-cultural.  Secondly, the Spanish text is REALLY easy for my students to learn.  When I taught at a bilingual school the students always giggled with this one: supposedly it's nonsense words, but looking it up it means "we're going to play a game of the goose."  Finally, it has a fun game.

Here's the spoken song:

Formation: standing circle, with student's left hands facing up and right hand, palm-up, in their neighbor's left hand.

Action: the students pass the beat by crossing their body with their right hand and tapping the hand of the neighbor to their left (their neighbor's right hand is resting in their left hand.)  This passes on the beat and the person tapped on "tres" is "out" and goes to the middle of the circle.  Play continues with all the players that are "out" joining and starting a new circle in the middle.  When the middle "out" circle outnumbers the "in" circle, the circles switch and the outed person now joins the outside circle.

Here is a PowerPoint I made that I will be using next week.  The phrasing is a in 2/4, so you'll see on the third slide that there are only two beats of text on that line.  I'm not sure how to better notate that, so if you have a suggestion please let me know! :)






Have a GREAT week!