Allez en vacances 2 - Little Imp visits the zoo!

I must admit that the weather in France was so wonderful and after all the rain of recent weeks back home, it really was difficult to drag ourselves away from the beach at all.  We did, however, make a day trip to the Zoo de Champrepus during the week.  If any of you are venturing over to Normandy at some point, I would definitely recommend this zoo - there is a good variety of animals including a farm/petting zoo area where the children can interact with and feed the goats, rabbits, guinea pigs, etc.  The food in the restaurant was tasty and reasonably priced and there were play areas and bouncy castles near the picnic areas. 

The trip to the zoo itself obviously provided a great opportunity to introduce Little Imp to the animal names in French.  Of course, a lot of them were new to her in English as well and so I made sure to talk about them and name them in both languages.  We took plenty of photographs of the animals and now back home we can reinforce the French names by naming the animals in French when we look at the pictures together.  Here is a small selection of the animals we saw:

le zèbre

le guépard

le flamant

la girafe

la chèvre

 le lémurien

 le lion

le suricate









le tigre

As well as naming the animals from the photographs, Little Imp has again been practising her colours in French by describing the animals to me, and we have been reinforcing body parts and numbers by counting legs and eyes, etc.

Little Imp was already a big fan of the book "Dear Zoo" by Rod Campbell and I have recently purchased the French/English bilingual version.  She is really enjoying listening to an already familiar story but in French and is already naming the animals in French when we read in French ( but still in English if we read that version).  I ordered my copy from Little Linguist but I'm sure that it is available in most large bookshops and online book retailers.

I really am amazed how quickly Little Imp is soaking up this new language and we really are having lots of fun together with our French.  I think animals will continue to be a topic we bring into our play over the next few weeks and I will let you know what games and activities we come up with to keep reinforcing them.