Cher Zoo...

This week, as a change from all songs, I decided to add a story at the end of our sing-song and relate our craft activity to this.  As you will know if you have read my first book review - I will get round to doing another one soon I promise! - Rod Campbell's Dear Zoo/Cher Zoo bilingual text is a real favourite with Little Imp at the moment.  We have been reading it at least once a day since our visit to the zoo on holiday and she is getting really good at naming the toy animals in French as well as English when we play with those.  It seemed, therefore, an obvious choice for a story - plus I had come across this lovely craft idea when googling last week and I thought the children would have fun making it so, decision made!

Now, in all honesty, there is a big difference between reading a story to one Little Imp on your knee and trying to show the pictures to a wriggly bunch of toddlers (and they were quite wriggly having danced around pretty energetically to the Hokey Cokey in French as well as ainsi font and meunier tu dors amongst others!), whilst simultaneously remembering the French text - but I think they all enjoyed it!!  They all stayed sitting and looking at the book so that must be a good sign! I guess we'll know for sure next week if they want to hear the story again!!  Anyway, even if the book wasn't as successful as the songs and rhymes are, I think it is valuable to include one every so often as it widens the language introduced quite significantly and also introduces French in another format.

If you don't have a copy of the book in French, it is possible to make your own simple French translation with a few phrases and the animal names and descriptions.  If you don't feel confident enough to ad lib the French, you could write out the phrases first and blu tac them into the English version to give you a prompt as you read it, I'm sure your little one wouldn't mind! :o)

The craft idea, is very simple to make but also very effective.  The original version I found on the web calls for animal crackers - now I had planned to substitute these for the chocolate animal biscuits that you get here in the UK, but decided that the Zoo would be a bit redundant once the biscuits had been eaten, and so I decided on Foam animal stickers as well.  The local Co-op and Spar both let me down unfortunately though - not a chocolate animal biscuit to be found :o( - so it was a good job we had the foam animals!
The original craft idea complete with edible animals can be found here:
http://www.allmylittlegems.com/2012/03/zoo-craft-for-kids-preschool-fun.html

Anyway, to make your our version of the Zoo you will need:
1 piece of A4 card,
4 or 5 pipecleaners
a hole punch
foam animal stickers or equivalent,
felt pens/crayons/glitter glue - to decorate your Zoo as you wish

1. Fold the card in half
2. Unfold and on the inside draw a rectangle on one half - leave enough of a border around the edge to allow for the holes to be punched
3. Cut out the rectangle and re-fold the card
4. Punch 4 or 5 pairs of holes along the top and bottom edge of the rectangle - try to line them up if you can
5. Stick your animals on to the card so that they can be seen through the cut out rectangle and decorate the zoo as you wish
6. Thread your pipe cleaners through the holes to make the bars, just twist the ends around to secure them

Here is how we all got on:

 

 

 

 

 

Hope you have lots of fun reading the story yourselves and creating your very own zoo! :o)