Saturday, 1 September 2012

Sur son petit cheval gris...

This week saw us all pretending to ride our multi-coloured horses to various towns and cities in France.  Our new rhyme was "Sur son petit cheval gris" which is an action rhyme to do on a grown-ups knee - think "this is the way the children ride" and you're on the right track.

So, the rhyme tells the story of a little boy called Jeannot and how he rides his horses to different places.  The town/city name is chosen to rhyme with the colour of the horse - e.g. Paris and cheval gris.  The actions are riding "au pas" - slowly, "au trot" - a bit faster, and then finally "au galop" - as fast as you like!

If you would like to give it a try at home, the words are as follows (of course, you can change the towns and colours as you wish!):


Quand Jeannot va à Paris
sur son petit cheval gris
Il va:
au pas, au pas, au pas.

Quand Jeannot va à Rouen
sur son petit cheval blanc
Il va:
au trot, au trot, au trot.

Quand Jeannot va à Quimper,
sur son petit cheval vert
Il va:
au galop, au galop, au galop.


To accompany our rhyme, this week our craft activity involved making a horse picture, the inspiration came from here: http://www.allkidsnetwork.com/crafts/animals/farm/footprint-horse.asp

And this is how we did it:

1.  To make our horse's head, we drew around our feet - just the basic outline, don't draw around the toes!

2.  To make the horses neck, cut a rectangle of paper and then cut off at an angle once you have positioned it on the background paper.  To make the mane you can let your toddler practice their scissor skills by snipping into one edge of the rectangle.

3. Glue the neck and head onto your paper and then add googly eyes, two triangle ears and make a forlock from ribbon, wool, etc.  Draw on nostrils and a mouth.

4.  Add the background detail to your picture.  We added things like grass at the bottom and the sky with a sun at the top.  We also used foam craft sticks to make a fence.

Here are our finished horse pictures - I think you will agree that they are pretty fabulous! :o)










1 comment:

  1. I love the way each child interprets the horses differently!

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