L'hiver - week 1 - puffy paint snowmen

Last Friday saw the return of our toddler French group after the Christmas break and the start of our new theme "l'hiver" (winter).

Our songs and crafts for the next few weeks will all have a wintery theme - and maybe the weather will bring us a little snow to play in too if we're lucky!! :0)

The songs we are singing include: je suis un bonhomme de neige, Frosty le bonhomme de neige, Brrr il fait froid - the lyrics for these can all be found on previous posts from Winter 2013.  And also a couple of new songs, the first is called "le pingouin" and is sung to the tune "il court, il court le furet" - I came across this song on the app "comptines pour enfants" which includes literally hundreds of songs and rhymes for children.  It proved a great hit with the children on Friday not least because there was lots of dancing and actions involved as we ran, skated, jumped, swam, etc like penguins! :0)

The second new song is one I made up myself, to the tune "teddy bear teddy bear", about un flocon de neige (a snowflake).  The lyrics are as follows:

Flocon de neige, flocon de neige,

Danse en l'air,

Flocon de neige, flocon de neige,

Touche la terre,

Flocon de neige, flocon de neige,

Pirouette très vite,

Flocon de neige, flocon de neige,

Fonde ensuite!

Our craft this week was a fairly messy one but really good fun and effective.  We made puffy paint snowmen.  We have used puffy paint once before (see the post on the song "Au clair de la lune") and the children really enjoyed it then and it seemed like the perfect choice for making snowmen pictures.

To make puffy paint you need to mix together shaving foam (not the gel kind) and pva glue.  You then use brushes or hands to make the snowman shape on a large piece of craft paper.  

We then used a variety of craft materials including felt, foam, wool, pipe cleaners, pom poms, buttons and ribbons to add eyes, noses, hats, scarves and buttons to our snowmen.  These can simply be placed on the snowman and the glue in the puffy paint will help them to stay in place when the snowman is dry.

Here are the finished snowmen looking fantastic I'm sure you will agree:

Happy singing and crafting! :0)

Au clair de la lune...

This week I opted for a very traditional French children's song "Au clair de la lune" for our new song.  I decided to use just the first verse as although the tune is not too fast the vocabulary is quite tricky for tiny tots and it is very important that the children are going to be able to join in with the singing as well as the mummies!

 

The first verse lyrics are as follows:

 

Au clair de la lune

Mon ami Pierrot

Prête-moi ta plume

pour écrire un mot

Ma chandelle est morte

Je n'ai plus de feu

Ouvre-moi la porte

Pour l'amour de Dieu

There is a translation of the lyrics into English on Mama Lisa's wonderful website here for those that would like one:
http://www.mamalisa.org/?lang=French&t=es&p=161

A song about the light of the moon, obviously needed a moon based craft activity and whilst trying to think of something I remembered a craft that I had done years ago when my eldest children were toddlers - puffy paint!  This would create the perfect texture for a picture of the moon.

To make your own puffy paint you will need 3 parts pva glue to 1 part shaving foam.  This must be the original foam and not the gel kind.  Just mix the two together and you have a wonderfully gooey (if rather manly smelling!) mixture with which to get creative.  When it dries it stays puffed up on the paper so ideal for our moon, but also great for a snow picture, etc.  If you want to make different colours of puffy paint just add a little food colouring to your mixture.

To create their moon pictures, out toddlers used brushes - or their hands - to spread puffy paint in a moon shape on their craft paper.  They then added some stars using a variety of materials from the craft box - felt, shiny paper, tissue paper, card, etc.  And a bit of sparkle with some gold glitter glue.

 

Here are their wonderful moon pictures:

 

Happy singing and crafting! :o)