À la ferme week 1 - farm animal glove puppets

Friday saw the first week of our new theme "à la ferme" and a lovely selection of farmyard songs.  Our songs include:

Dans la ferme de Macdonald (old Macdonald had a farm); baa baa mouton noir (baa baa black sheep); cinq petits cochons (this little piggy); le fermier dans son pré (the farmer's in his den) and sur son petit cheval gris.  Most of these songs have their own blog posts if you want the lyrics or other related craft ideas.

For our first farm craft I decided that we would make some animal glove puppets.  Little Imp got a puppet theatre for Christmas and is still very excited to put on little shows for us with her puppets and I felt sure that the other toddlers would enjoy making and playing with puppets too.

I bought premade felt glove puppets from a local craft shop and then the children set about decorating them and turning them into animals.  To decorate we had a selection of coloured felt and pva glue.

Here are our wonderful puppets to inspire you:

Un canard (a duck)

Un cochon (a pig)

une vache (a cow)

une poule (a hen)

un cochon

un canard

Of course there are plenty of other farm animals you could make, perhaps you will make one of these animals:

une chèvre (a goat)

un mouton (a sheep)

un cheval (a horse)

un chien (a dog)

Happy singing and crafting! :0)

Joyeuse Saint-Valentin! Hearts and hugs

As our toddler French sessions run on a Friday, and as this Friday was St.Valentine's Day it seemed only right to have a valentine's theme for the day.

Instead of singing our l'hiver themed songs this week, each child attending got to choose a song that they love for us all to sing.  The choices included "Brille, Brille, petite étoile", "un éléphant se balançait", "flocon de neige, flocon de neige" and "le petit train" and it was lovely to revisit some old favourites :0)

I pondered all week on what craft to choose, and finally it came to me - un câlin (a cuddle).  Asking for un câlin is one of Little Imp's favourite French phrases at the moment and I was thinking about how much family and friends living further away would love a cuddle from her.  How to make a postable cuddle? Quite simply in all honesty! You will need:

A long thin length of card,

An a4 piece of card,

A pencil,

Glue stick,

Scissors,

Red and pink collage materials - we had a selection including foam, felt, tissue paper, crepe paper, ribbon, wool, stickers, etc

Glitter 

Felt pens/crayons 

First, measure your toddler's arm span with the long length of card and cut to the right length, set aside.

On the a4 sheet, draw around your toddlers' hands and draw a large heart.  Cut out the 3 shapes.

Let your toddler go crazy with the collage materials, glue, pens, crayons and glitter to decorate the heart and hands.

Glue the heart into the middle of the length of card and the hands on to either end.

Add some writing if you wish.  We added the phrase "un câlin pour toi" a cuddle for you.

There you have it a perfect toddler sized valentine's hug, when it arrives the lucky recipient can have a hug from the toddler sized arms :0) so cute! :0) and of course not only suitable for valentine's day, you could make them for any occasion.

Here are ours to give you some inspiration:

Happy singing and crafting! :0)

L'hiver week 4 - snowflake paintings

After a week off with a poorly Little Imp, our toddler French group was back on Friday to continue our wintery theme.  

I had printed out some snowflake shapes on card and cut these out for the toddlers to use on their paintings.  There were lots of colours of paint to choose from and a variety of painting tools - bristle brushes, foam brushes, rollers, stamps with a range of different textures, sponges, etc.

The idea was to place a few snowflakes on the paper and then go crazy with the paint all over the top.  Once you peel off the snowflake templates you are left with bright white snowflakes jumping out from the brightly coloured background.

Here are our fantastic snowflake paintings:

Happy singing and crafting! :0)