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)

Le corps week 6 - moi!

In our 6th and final week of our topic le corps last Friday, we made life size people.

Our toddlers lay down on a long sheet of wall lining paper and we drew around them.  They then had free choice from a variety of craft materials to make their life size person - felt, foam, wrapping paper, shiny paper, tissue paper, crepe paper, wool, ribbon, pipe cleaners, glitter glue, buttons, etc.

Once complete, these were then labelled in French with the names of the body parts: la tête, le bras, la jambe, la main, le pied etc.

The children really enjoyed having such a big canvas to be creative on this week and this is a craft that would be easy and fun to replicate at home.

Here are our creations to give you some inspiration:

Happy singing and crafting! We'll be back in a fortnight with a new topic and a new collection of songs and crafts! :0)

Le corps week 5 - mon monstre!

Continuing with our body theme this week, I decided on a painting activity.  Should we do self-portraits or try to paint pictures of each other I wondered? Then I had a bit of inspiration - if we painted monsters we would be able to talk about the body parts and practice our numbers by deciding how many heads, arms and legs etc to give the monsters.

The children all enjoyed getting messy with the paints and created some fantastic monsters, here they are:

Happy singing and crafting! :0)

Le corps week 4 - biscuit faces

For our fourth week on the theme "le corps" I borrowed an activity from Little Imp's preschool. They have been learning about the body in English over the last few weeks and last week made fruity biscuit faces. 

The children had lots of fun deciding what fruit to use for eyes, noses and mouths and some even gave their biscuits hair.  The activity gave the opportunity to reinforce some face vocabulary (see last post for a list) and also fruits - we used: les raisins secs, les framboises and les mandarines for our faces :0)

Here are our rather yummy faces:

Happy singing and crafting! :0)