Preschool session 6 - les animaux et les couleurs

After a week off for half-term, I was interested to see how much my little pre-schoolers would have remembered of what we had learnt over our first 5 sessions.  I was amazed to find them not only able to say "bonjour" and sing our bonjour song with their usual gusto but also easily able to recall numbers to 6, how to introduce themselves, say how they are, AND sing all the songs and rhymes we have been learning!  They really are little superstars and it just goes to show what even a little foreign language exposure a week at such a young age can do, their little brains just soak it all up - fantastic!

So, for this half-term we will of course continue to reinforce the work we did over the first few sessions but our new topics are going to be animals and colours and they are going to be mainly focused around Eric Carle's "Ours brun, dis-moi..."  this seemed an obvious choice of story for this topic.  If you are unfamiliar with it check out my blog post of a couple of week's ago about the story.

I read the story to the children in English and French and decided for the first session to focus on just 4 animal words in depth.  I chose l'ours (the bear), le mouton (the sheep), le chien (the dog) and le chat (the cat).  I chose these particular 4 for the following reasons - the bear because this is the title and starting point of the story; the sheep because this allowed me to introduce the song baa baa mouton noir and the colour noir (black); and le chien and le chat as I figured several of the children would have one of these as a pet and so would be interested to learn their names in French.

We practiced saying the names of these 4 animals and then we played 2 games with our puppet Jacques.  In the first game, Jacques tried to remember the names of the animals, if he got them right the children would put their thumbs up and say "oui", if he got it wrong they would put their thumbs down and tell him the correct name of the animal.  In the second game, I asked the children to "fermez les yeux" (close their eyes) and Jaques hid one of the animals - the children had to say in French which animal was missing when they opened their eyes.  The children all responded well to these games and they provided plenty of oral and listening practice of the new words.

We then sang baa baa black sheep in English before I introduced the French version.  For those who are unfamiliar with the lyrics, they are as follows:

Baa baa mouton noir
As-tu de la laine?
Oui, monsieur, oui, monsieur,
trois poches pleines.
Une pour mon maître,
Une pour Madame,
Et une pour les enfants
qui jouent au ra-ta-tam.

I then asked the children to choose another colour from the story, they chose rouge and so we sang "baa baa mouton rouge" instead!  This proved a popular addition and so I intend to add to this over the next few weeks by adding additional verses including a variety of colours.

I have decided that for this topic each of the children will make a mini book.  I have made them all a front cover entitled "Je vois..."  and this week gave each of them page one which has a picture of a sheep and the line "un mouton noir" ready for them to colour in black.  We will add a page or two each week and then once complete it can be stapled together as a little book to read together at home and reinforce the language.

As always, we rounded off our session by singing au revoir to each other.

Animal vocabulary can be reinforced at home if playing with toy animals, or looking at picture books with animals in.  Also a day trip to the zoo or just to the park to feed the ducks can provide opportunities.

Colours can be practiced even more easily - when putting bricks or mega blocks away, when getting dressed, when out and about, in the car - my children love to take a colour or two each and when they see a car in one of their colours they have to shout out it's colour name.

Hope you have a fun week of colours and animals! :o)