L'hiver - week 1 - puffy paint snowmen

Last Friday saw the return of our toddler French group after the Christmas break and the start of our new theme "l'hiver" (winter).

Our songs and crafts for the next few weeks will all have a wintery theme - and maybe the weather will bring us a little snow to play in too if we're lucky!! :0)

The songs we are singing include: je suis un bonhomme de neige, Frosty le bonhomme de neige, Brrr il fait froid - the lyrics for these can all be found on previous posts from Winter 2013.  And also a couple of new songs, the first is called "le pingouin" and is sung to the tune "il court, il court le furet" - I came across this song on the app "comptines pour enfants" which includes literally hundreds of songs and rhymes for children.  It proved a great hit with the children on Friday not least because there was lots of dancing and actions involved as we ran, skated, jumped, swam, etc like penguins! :0)

The second new song is one I made up myself, to the tune "teddy bear teddy bear", about un flocon de neige (a snowflake).  The lyrics are as follows:

Flocon de neige, flocon de neige,

Danse en l'air,

Flocon de neige, flocon de neige,

Touche la terre,

Flocon de neige, flocon de neige,

Pirouette très vite,

Flocon de neige, flocon de neige,

Fonde ensuite!

Our craft this week was a fairly messy one but really good fun and effective.  We made puffy paint snowmen.  We have used puffy paint once before (see the post on the song "Au clair de la lune") and the children really enjoyed it then and it seemed like the perfect choice for making snowmen pictures.

To make puffy paint you need to mix together shaving foam (not the gel kind) and pva glue.  You then use brushes or hands to make the snowman shape on a large piece of craft paper.  

We then used a variety of craft materials including felt, foam, wool, pipe cleaners, pom poms, buttons and ribbons to add eyes, noses, hats, scarves and buttons to our snowmen.  These can simply be placed on the snowman and the glue in the puffy paint will help them to stay in place when the snowman is dry.

Here are the finished snowmen looking fantastic I'm sure you will agree:

Happy singing and crafting! :0)