The Ants Go Marching is another one of my childhood favorites, and lately, a great way to incorporate some fun rhyming, sequencing, gross motor, and counting objectives into an individual session. Usually I use a small and large gather drum to keep the rhythm, but as long as you have two of them, any size drum will work.

For the first part of the verse, play the smaller of the two drums together while either keep a steady beat, or mixing it up with different rhythms for more of a challenge. The most common that I use is playing a beat for each syllable, and for another fun twist, you can also use different dynamics when you play each drum. When you get to the BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM, switch to the large gather drum and play as loudly as you can with one beat for each BOOM.

The ants go marching one by one, Hurrah! Hurrah!

The ants go marching one by one, Hurrah! Hurrah!

The ants go marching one by one, the little one stopped to suck his thumb.

And they all went marching down, to the ground, to get out of the rain

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!

I found a fantastic set of visuals that has the number on the top, the ants to count, and most importantly, a picture of the  rhyming word for those of us who have trouble remembering the lyrics 🙂 Here is the link for the printables. I found that it was easiest to copy/paste it into word doc to enlarge them and before printing and laminating them.