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)