L'hiver week 4 - snowflake paintings

After a week off with a poorly Little Imp, our toddler French group was back on Friday to continue our wintery theme.  

I had printed out some snowflake shapes on card and cut these out for the toddlers to use on their paintings.  There were lots of colours of paint to choose from and a variety of painting tools - bristle brushes, foam brushes, rollers, stamps with a range of different textures, sponges, etc.

The idea was to place a few snowflakes on the paper and then go crazy with the paint all over the top.  Once you peel off the snowflake templates you are left with bright white snowflakes jumping out from the brightly coloured background.

Here are our fantastic snowflake paintings:

Happy singing and crafting! :0)

L'hiver week 3 - ice skates

Continuing with our wintery theme and given the reference to skating in the song "le pingouin", I decided that our craft this week would be ice skates.  As well as giving the children the opportunity to go crazy with the glue and glitter they would also have a lacing activity to have a go at which I was sure they would enjoy.  Little Imp currently loves playing with her lacing cards :0)

To make your own ice skate craft you will need:

White card - reasonably thick to give some stability but not too thick that you can't fold it easily.

A hole punch

Ribbon/wool for lacing

A variety of collage materials and stickers - whatever you have in the craft drawer 

Glue

Glitter/glitter glue

Craft lollipop sticks

Scissors

First draw and cut out your 2 ice skates.  You can either draw freehand or print a template from the internet and draw round - there are plenty of ice skate colouring sheets available to print for free.  Just make sure you leave 2 lengths at the bottom which you can fold up to hold the lollipop stick blades in place later.

Next, punch 3 holes in each ice skate for the laces and help your little one to thread their chosen ribbon or wool through the holes and tie bows at the top.

You then need to glue the lollipop sticks in position as the blades. Fold the two flaps that you left at the bottom up and glue them on the back of the skates over the lollipop sticks so that they hold them in place.  Craft glue will be better than a glue stick for this or even some double sides tape maybe.

Finally, let your toddler snip, glue, stick and glitter to their heart's content to decorate their ice skates.

Et Voila, beautiful wintery ice skates just like these:

Happy singing and crafting! :0)

L'hiver week 2 - fruity snowmen

For our second winter themed craft, I opted for an edible delight I had seen on Pinterest, fruity snowmen.  Little Imp is a big fan of making her food look like something on the plate - she is still insisting that her scrambled egg be presented as "Rudolph" with toast antlers and a tomato nose almost a month after Christmas :0) I thought that a snowman shaped snack would probably be appealing to all our toddlers :0)

To make your own you will need:

3 thick slices of banana for the head and body,

A triangle shaped piece of apple for the hat

Half a grape for the bobble,

A little triangle of apple (or carrot) for the nose,

Mini chocolate chips for eyes and buttons

And 2 pretzel sticks for arms

The ones I saw on Pinterest used bamboo skewers but I was a bit concerned about the pointy ends and so used cake pop sticks.  They are quite a bit thicker than the skewers though and it was quite tricky to get the banana slices on without splitting them, so possibly snipping the pointy ends off the skewers would have been a better option :0)

Here are our yummy, scrummy snowmen:

And a snow dog! :0)

Happy singing and crafting! :0)

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)

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)