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)
