Noël week 3 - cartes de noël

Our final toddler French before Christmas ended up with us making Christmas cards, that was not quite what I had in mind at the start of the week, however!

My plan was for us to make salt dough ornaments. I was going to make the salt dough in advance, split into several bowls and colour with food colouring so that all the mummies would have to do when they got the decorations home was bake them. A fantastic idea I thought and one which I have tried before so I knew would work - until that is I started searching Pinterest!! I came across an amazing recipe for a pure white salt dough. It seemed simple enough and how wonderful, I thought, to be able to make white looking snowmen and white Santa beards.

Well, goodness only knows what I did wrong but what I ended up with in no way resembled salt dough!! It was however the most fantastic stuff - crumbly in your hands and mouldable but when you put it down it "melted"!

Okay, I thought slight change of plan after our singing we will play with snow instead! Little Imp was certainly enjoying playing with it once it was made.

Alas, by the following morning my "snow" had set solid!! Arrrgghh disaster!! A quick raid of the craft cupboard and we were off, armed with enough card and crafty bits to make some beautiful cartes de noël.

The toddlers seemed happy enough with the choice of craft and made these beautiful cards for their family and friends.

Little Imp and I wish you all a "joyeux Noël et une bonne année" and hope that Papa Noël pays you all a visit next week! :0)

Noël week 2 - handprint Christmas tree canvases

This week we again sang our selection of Christmas songs and I decided it would be nice to make a proper keepsake craft either for our toddlers to keep or to give as a Christmas gift.  Little Imp has decided that she would like to give hers to her grandparents and so it is now wrapped and under the tree :0)

Obviously you can buy special acrylic paints to use on canvases but these don't really mix well with toddlers so we just used our usual washable poster paints in a variety of colours.  Our toddlers used their handprints to make the tree itself and fingerprints for the baubles.  They then added the trunk, star and a pot if they wanted on using a bristle or foam brush.  

I think the results are fab and there will definitely be one delighted set of grandparents in our house on Christmas Day :0)

We have one more Christmassy toddler session to go before the big day arrives but until then Happy singing and crafting! :0)

Noël week 1 - advent calendars

Last Friday was a first in our almost 2 years of Toddler French - Little Imp and I were the only ones there!! We started our new topic of Noël (Christmas) today then but I kept with last week's planned craft of an Advent calendar even though we are a few days into Advent now!

The songs I have chosen for our Noël theme are ones which I feel are simple enough for our toddlers to join in with and which have actions to accompany them.  Some are French songs - but some I have just written my own French version of English toddler/preschooler Christmas songs.  You can find lyrics for several of our Christmas songs on last year's Christmas time posts.  Our songs this year are:

Nous chantons joyeux Noël

Dix petits rennes de Noël

Je suis un bonhomme de neige

Quand le père noël

Frosty le bonhomme de neige

and Papa Noël, où est tu?

The craft is one that proved very popular last year, a Father Christmas Advent Calendar.  The children decorated Santa's hat and face with an assortment of red, white and green materials, pens and glitters. The idea is to cover the numbered circle each day with a cotton wool ball and by Christmas Eve Father Christmas' beard is complete! We, of course, glued cotton wool on the first 6 numbers as we decorated. :0)

Here are our completed calendars:

Happy singing and crafting! :0)

L'automne week 3 - autumn leaves

Unfortunately we had to miss a week of toddler French as I had laryngitis and no voice :0( last Friday though with my voice almost back to normal we were back in full swing for our third and final autumnal themed week ( this week we will be starting our Christmas themed songs and  crafts 🎅).

My plan had been to collect lots and lots of autumn leaves for our toddlers to paint and then make print paintings with. The weather Gods were against me though as autumn so far has been wet and rainy rather than crisp and cold resulting in leaves that were just a big soggy mush and not suitable for printing with.

Back to the drawing board and Little Imp was still very keen to have a painting craft so I decided that we would instead create our own autumn tree paintings using our fingerprints to make the autumn leaves.

The toddlers had a range of foam and bristle brushes and foam rollers to choose from to help them paint the tree trunk and branches, they then finger-painted the leaves onto and around their trees.  Some of them chose to add extras to their paintings as well like hedgehogs, robins and snowmen.  The final results were, I'm sure you'll agree, fantastic:

Happy singing and crafting and see you next week with some fabulous festive tunes :0) 🎅

L'automne week 2 - fireworks

Now, I know that bonfire night is an English tradition and not a French one but I found such a great song last year about fireworks that we had to sing it again.  For the lyrics and a link to the song on you tube check out my blog post from last November "Boum, Boum, Boum".

Our craft this week was to make firework pictures. To do this, we used pipe cleaners which we shaped into stars and spirals and used as stampers, cotton buds to dab little specks of colour and paintbrushes to splatter paint onto the black paper.

I think the results speak for themselves:

We hope you have fun making your own firework inspired pictures!

Happy singing and crafting! :0)

L'automne week 1 - umbrella pictures

After 2 weeks off and a week of lovely warm weather and sunshine on our half-term holiday, the cold, wet English weather we returned to seemed a good fit for our new topic of l'automne (autumn).

The songs which we will be singing over the next few weeks, before we get into the Christmas season!, include the following:

L'automne est un chanson de pluie,

Goutte, gouttelettes de pluie,

Il pleut, il mouille,

Meunier tu dors

Comptine des couleurs d'automne

And

Les feux d'artifices ( of course there had to be some reference to bonfire night!)

These are all songs which have featured previously in the blog with accompanying crafts so please have a browse for the lyrics and some more craft ideas :0)

This week we made umbrella pictures.  We used cupcake cases folded in half to make the umbrellas and pipe cleaners for the handles. We used felt, foam and cotton wool to make our rain clouds and glitter glue in silver, blue and white for the raindrops.  We then added some people or creatures under our umbrellas and added any other decorations we wanted.

Here are our finished pictures:

Happy crafting and singing! :0)