coccinelle, demoiselle...

Last Friday's session introduced the comptine "Coccinelle demoiselle" a French nursery rhyme about ladybirds. 

As is often the case with nursery rhymes there are several versions, generally it is just a case of the colours being in a different order.  Anyway, for the version that  we sang the lyrics were as follows:

Coccinelle, demoiselle,

Bête à Bon Dieu,

Coccinelle, demoiselle,

Vole jusqu'aux cieux.

Petit point blanc

Elle attend.

Petit point rouge

Elle bouge.

Petit point noir

Coccinelle au revoir!

To accompany the song, our craft this week involved making our own ladybird hats. 

To make one of your own you will need,
a long strip of card (well long enough to wrap around your little ones head)
red collage materials - we had a variety including felt, paper, tissue paper, crepe paper, foam, ribbon, shiny paper, etc
black paper,
spot stickers,
a pipe cleaner,
a pencil,
a stapler

First make 2 holes in the top centre of the strip of card and thread the pipe cleaner through.  Wrap each end of the pipe cleaner around the pencil to make the twisty antennae shape.

Use the red collage materials you have to cover the cardboard.

Cut a semi circle out of the black paper and glue onto the cardboard below the antennae for the ladybird's face.  Add a face using googly/sticker eyes, felt pens/glitter glue etc.

Give your ladybird some spots using the spot stickers.

Wrap your cardboard around to make a hat shape and staple at the right size for you little one's head.

Here are ours to give you some ideas:

Happy singing and crafting! :O)

Les petits poissons...

As we haven't had the paints out for a while, I decided on a song that I had a great painty craft activity in mind for.

The new song is called "les petits poissons" the little fish and there are a few different versions out there. The one I settled on has 3 verses the first about little fish, the second about little birds and the third about little children. I chose this version as I felt it gave us the most options to dance around and do some actions during our sing song :0)

The lyrics are as follows:

Les petits poissons dans l'eau

Nagent, nagent, nagent, nagent, nagent.

Les petits poissons dans l'eau

Nagent, nagent bien que les gros!

Les petits oiseaux là-haut

Volent, volent, volent, volent, volent.

Les petits oiseaux là-haut

Volent, volent bien que les gros!

Les petits enfants charmants,

Dansent, dansent, dansent, dansent, dansent.

Les petits enfants charmants,

Dansent, dansent bien que les gros!

So, as I said, the craft to accompany this song was a nice messy painty craft of the little fish in the sea. Before all the children arrived I had covered the table with bubble wrap and put out blue, green, white and sparkly blue paints with an assortment of brushes, rollers and sponges.  The children all looked very impressed when I told them they had to cover all the bubble wrap with the paint any way they wished to make a nice sea colour :0)

Once the bubble wrap was well and truly covered in paint, I gave each child an a3 sheet of white paper to print the sea background onto. In my mind this was going to give us a beautiful bubbly sea effect and I was not disappointed, the prints looked great! :0)

Whilst the backgrounds were drying. Little, the children got washed up and I got rid of the painty bubble wrap. The table was then ready for part 2 of the craft, making little fish out of craft foam to then glue onto the prints.  We then had fantastic pictures of little fish swimming in the water - just like the song - and here they are:

Happy singing and crafting! :0)

Il était une bergère...

There was a shepherdess was the new song a couple of weeks ago - only now finding time to post!! - and an opportunity to also revist an old toddler French favourite "baa baa mouton noir".

Il était une bergère is a traditional French comptine with a few versions and many verses. Although it starts off fairly lightheartedly about a shepherdess making cheese from her Sheep's milk it becomes more and more sinister as the song goes on ending with the death of the kitten in some versions or continuing with extra verses where she visits the confessional and seeks forgiveness in some. I took the decision, therefore, that we would stick with the first 2 verses only for the purposes of the toddler group :0)

The lyrics for these two verses are as follow:

Il ètait une bergère

Et Ron et Ron petit patapon,

Il était une bergère

Qui gardait ses moutons, Ron, Ron,

Qui gardait ses moutons.

Elle fit un fromage,

Et Ron et Ron petit patapon

Elle fit un fromage

Au lait de ses moutons Ron Ron

Au lait de ses moutons.

There are various versions available on iTunes to download of you can listen and watch some animated versions on you tube.

Our accompanying craft is one which we did in our very first toddler French session to go with baa baa mouton noir but as we only had 2 children at that session I decided we would do it again.

To make your own standing woolly sheep you will need:

White card

2 wooden pegs

Felt pens

Googly/sticker eyes

Wool - any colour(s) you choose

First cut out a sheep body shape from your card and set aside, then cut out a head shape, draw on a mouth, colour in the ears, add eyes and set aside

Decide what colour you want your Sheep's legs to be and use the felt pens to colour in the wooden pegs.

Decide on the colour(s) you want for your sheep and then begin winding wool all around your Sheep's body. Some of our toddlers chose to instead cut up the wool and stick it on to the body which worked just as well :0)

Attach the pegs to the body and then glue on the face.

Voilà - one little woolly sheep which should stand up by itself (a bit of tweaking of the pegs might be required!)

Here are our fantastic creations:

 

Happy singing and crafting! :O)

 

Preschool session 9 - les animaux et les couleurs

Time seems to be flying by so quickly at the moment, that end of summer term round of cello concerts, sports days, dance shows... I can't believe how far behind I am with keeping the blog updated!  I will give a quick overview of what we did in the Preschool groups last week here, then update with last week's toddler session.  Then I will try to get back on track this weekend with a proper post about this week's preschool session which will be the final one before the summer break.

So, last week we were continuing with our theme of animals and colours based around the story ours brun, dis-moi.  We sang the songs we have been learning over the last few weeks - "Dans la ferme de Macdonald", "Tourne tourne petit moulin", "Deux petits oiseaux", "Peux tu marcher comme un canard" and "Baa baa mouton noir".  Again, we expanded on Baa Baa by adding extra verses as the children chose different colours for the sheep to be.

We played a game with the coloured beanbags, throwing and catching and calling out the colours - the children are all gaining in confidence in naming the colours in French and are really good at recognising the French names if I call for "vert" for example the child with the green beanbag will throw it to me, more often than not accompanied by the other children shouting "A. has it!"

I introduced a new game in this session as well which proved a big big hit - so popular in fact that we had to play it twice and had there been more time the children would have loved to play it again, I have promised we will play it at this week's session :o)  The game is one I am sure you are familiar with - matching pairs.  I made some cards of the animals in the story, so a brown bear, yellow duck, etc.  I then cut these in half so that the children have to find the matching heads and tails of the animals.  We sat in a circle and each child took it in turns to turn two cards over - if the cards matched they got to keep them, if not they had to turn them back over.  However, to get us practicing the French vocabulary they also had to name either the colours they had turned over or the animals.  On our second game, they had a go at naming both.  Such a simple game and one that could easily be adapted to introduce French vocabulary with any matching pairs game I'm sure - Little Imp has a game that matches the animal to it's baby and this is great fun to play in French or English.

I read the children a new story about animals, the wonderful "Cher Zoo" (Dear Zoo) by Rod Campbell.  The children enjoyed the story and I was thrilled that some of them were able to join in with "grenouille" (frog) and all were able to join in with "chien" (dog) - the animals that we have come across in Ours brun over the past few weeks.  As well as listening to the story, we also spoke about the various colours of the animals and the boxes and crates that they are hiding under.  You can find my review of this book here: http://www.frenchfortoddlers.blogspot.co.uk/p/book-reviews.html 
And an idea for a dear zoo craft activity here: http://www.frenchfortoddlers.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/cher-zoo.html

The next session will be the final one on this topic and the final one before the summer break.  The children will all be bringing home their end of topic certificates and also their progress reports. 

Wishing you a fun week of French! :o)