goutte gouttelettes de pluie...

 

This week's toddler session saw the introduction of 2 new songs.  Both on the theme of rain and both very short, hence including them both today. 

The first of these songs is called "goutte gouttelettes de pluie" and is actually quite a long song.  I came across a version though which was just the chorus of the song and decided that this was perfect for our toddlers.  The chorus that we sang goes like this:

 

Goutte gouttelettes de pluie,

Mon chapeau se mouille.

Goutte goutelettes de pluie,

Mes souliers aussi.

 

 

The full version, lyrics and an mp3 version to listen to, can be found here for those of you that would like it: http://www.momes.net/comptines/eau/gouttesgouttelettes.html

 

The second song is called "L'automne est une chanson de pluie" and is actually supposed to be sung as a round.  Our toddlers are a bit too young to grasp the concept of singing in a round though and so we just sang it as it is.  The words are as follows:

 

L'automne est une chanson de pluie,

ouvre donc,

ouvre donc,

ton parapluie,

ton parapluie.

 

An mp3 version to listen to for the tune can be found here:

http://www.mamalisa.com/?t=es&p=3042&c=22

 

Clearly, songs about rain needed rainy crafts and I came across two lovely crafts which I decided to combine for our activity this week.  The ideas came from here: http://kiboomukidscrafts.com/alphabet-letters-letter-u/ and here: http://www.mamajennblogs.com/search/label/Letter%20%22U%22%20Activities

 

Basically, the idea is to make a rainy picture with umbrellas, clouds, etc and then raindrops which look real. And this is how we did it.

 

You will need:

craft paper

cupckae cases/doilies/ similar

pipe cleaners

cotton wool

pva glue

glitter glue

any other items you would like for decoration - we had stickers, felt shapes, ribbon, foam shapes, foam animals for example.

 

To make the umbrellas, you need to cut a pipe cleaner in half and bend into a j shape for the handle. 

 

Then cut a cupcake case in half, or cut a semi-circle shape out of a doily/foam/felt, etc. 

 

Glue your umbrellas to your craft paper.

 

Glue on some cotton wool clouds and add any extras you wish.  If you look at our pictures you will see animals under the umbrellas, a puddle, stickers to decorate the umbrellas, etc.

 

Now, to make the rain!

 

Blob pva glue and glitter glue randomly onto the picture.

Hang the picture upright to dry - you could peg it onto the washing line for example, or like we did sellotape to the window. You will see that the glue rain starts to drip down the paper just like raindrops.

 

 

 

Once the glue is dry it goes clear and really does look like you paper is rain splattered.  The picture unfortunately doesn't look as good as it does in real life.

 

 

Here are our finished pictures:

 

 

I hope that you enjoy trying out our rainy songs and crafts!

 

 

Boum, Boum, Boum!

After 2 weeks of no toddler group, Little Imp has been impatiently waiting for Friday to come around ever since we returned from holiday.  And it was great this morning to see so many happy, smiling faces who obviously all felt the same way!

Now, I know that Bonfire night is an English tradition and definitely not a French one, but I was sure that I would be able to find a song about fireworks in French.  And after a bit of googling I came across an excellent song on you tube written and performed by Catherine Puyravaud.  Here is a link to the you tube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnzC7V_DYlY

The lyrics go like this:

Boum, boum, boum les feux d’artifice

Ecoutez, comme ils font du bruit!

Boum, boum, boum les feux d’artifice

Regardez comme ils sont jolis!

Y’en a des rouges

Et y’en a des jaunes!

Y’en a des verts

Et y’en a des bleus!

Boum, boum, boum les feux d’artifice

Ecoutez, comme ils font du bruit!

Boum, boum, boum les feux d’artifice

Regardez comme ils sont jolis!

Obviously a fireworks song needs a fireworks craft.  This week we made fireworks paintings.  To create your own, you will need: black paper, a variety of bright coloured paints and a straw.  The idea is simple, you need to water down the paint a little so that it will move easily across the paper.  Then you drop paint onto the paper randomly and blow through the straw to make the paint spread out and create fireworks patterns.

Here are how ours turned out:

Little Imp and I hope you all have a fantastic Bonfire night on Monday and enjoy any fireworks displays you go to - we also hope you enjoy singing and painting about them too! :o)

Sur le pont d'Avignon...

This week's new song was the French classic "Sur le pont d'Avignon".  After our usual sing song we worked out some actions for the song - deciding what our handsome men and beautiful ladies would do - and then had a go at the song.  We danced around in a circle as is traditional for this song, and our handsome men gave a bow, our beautiful ladies gave a curtsey, the little boys did some funky dance moves and the little girls beautiful pirouettes.

The version that I chose to use was from the ELC CD "Fun with French".  I chose this version because it was at a good speed for non-native speakers and children alike - the versions on the French albums were just too fast really! :o)

If you have not come across this CD, it is really nice, a good selections of songs and all with an English version included to to fit to the tune.

I'm sure that everybody knows the words to this song already, but in case you don't this is how the chorus goes:

Sur le pont d'Avignon,

On y danse, on y danse,

sur le pont d'Avignon,

on y danse tous en rond.

And the verses all follow this pattern:

Les beaux messieurs font comme ça,

et puis encore comme ça!                      *This is the bit where we added our extra actions*

Clearly our craft today had to continue with the dancing theme and so we decorated some dancers with whatever we wanted from the craft table - glitter, felt, fabric petals, doilies, cupcake cases, stickers, foam, etc.  I had just printed out a variety of colouring pictures of dancers onto thin card.  Some of the children chose to add lollipop sticks to make their dancers into puppets and some decided to keep them as they were.

Here is how we got on:

We hope that you have as much fun dancing and crafting as we did! :o)

il y a quatre saisons...

Given the change in the weather and the very definite autumnal feel this week, I decided that we should have a new song which included something about the weather or the seasons.  The song I chose is one that always proves popular in the primary school classes as it has a good catchy tune and the lyrics are simple and repetitive.

The song is called "les quatre saisons", there are four seasons and it can be found and downloaded from skoldo here in the form of an mp3 track and a sheet with the lyrics on:
http://www.skoldo.com/node/2266

The song names the four seasons in French and then goes on to describe the weather for each season.   The opening lyrics are as follows:
Il y a quatre saisons dans une année
le printemps, l'été, l'automne, l'hiver.

This song obviously required a craft activity to do with the seasons and as we hadn't had the paints out for a while I decided to try and find a painting activity to fit the bill.  I stumbled across the blog "the ramblings of a crazy woman" and this great craft activity: http://jennwa.blogspot.co.uk/2008/04/pre-school-seasons-craft.html

To complete this craft yourself at home, you will need the following:
large sheet of construction paper, or we used lining paper (I find this is great for painting as the paint doesn't go through the paper and you can cut of a piece as big or as small as you want)
paint - brown, green, orange, yellow, pink, white, red ( or just the primaries and white and mix your own)
foam paint brush

Then just liberally paint your toddler's arm and hand with brown paint a print 4 "trees".

Next, finger paint to make them represent each season.  We did it like this:
Spring - green for leaves and pink for blossom
Summer - green for leaves and red for apples
Autumn - orange, yellow, brown and red leaves
Winter - white snow


Here are our fantastic four seasons paintings for you to enjoy:

 

Happy singing and painting! :o)

un éléphant se balançait...

 One elephant went out to play on a spider's web one day...

I had never heard of this rhyme in English, knowing only the French version - but stumbled across it when looking for craft ideas for this week's new French song.  If you would like to take a look at the English version, you can find it on the sparklebox website here: http://www.sparklebox.co.uk/

Although the 2 versions are slightly different, they are both very sweet and lovely to sing and act out. 

Traditionally, the children would be in a circle with one child in the middle as the elephant, with each verse the "elephant" chooses another to come and play on the spider's web until when there are 5 of them the web breaks and they all fall to the ground.

The French version goes like this:

Un éléphant se balançait

1.          Un éléphant se balançait

sur une toile, toile, toile, toile d’araignée

c’était un jeu tellement amusant

il appela... un deuxième éléphant.

2.          Deux éléphants se balançaient

sur une toile, toile, toile, toile d’araignée

c’était un jeu tellement amusant

ils appelèrent... un troisième éléphant.

3.          ils appelèrent... un quatrième éléphant.

4.          ils appelèrent... un cinqième éléphant.

5.          Cinq elephants se balançaient

sur une toile, toile, toile, toile d’araignée

c’était un jeu tellement amusant

que tout d’un coup – BA DA BOUM!

 

The tune can be found on the brilliant Mama Lisa's website: www.mamalisa.com 

For those of you that are not familiar with this website it is an absolute treasure trove of children's songs and rhymes from around the world with mp3's of the tunes so that you can have a go at singing them yourself!  Well worth a visit! :o)

 

Our craft activity this week was to create our own spider's web with 5 elephants.

 

To make your own, you will need:

a paper plate,

scissors,

wool,

sellotape,

five little elephant blanks on thin card

feltpens, glitter, etc for decorating

 

The instructions are as follows:

1. Snip small triangles around the edge of your paper plate.

 

2.  Weave over and around the plate with the wool randomly to create your web.

 

3. Colour in the elephants and number them 1 to 5

 

4.  Add any other decoration to your web/plate/elephants as you wish

 

5. Stick the elephants on to the plate.

 

Here are our finished spider webs and elephants:

 

 

 

 

A simple but effective craft idea I think!

Happy singing and crafting! :o)

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)