L'automne week 3 - autumn leaves

Unfortunately we had to miss a week of toddler French as I had laryngitis and no voice :0( last Friday though with my voice almost back to normal we were back in full swing for our third and final autumnal themed week ( this week we will be starting our Christmas themed songs and  crafts 🎅).

My plan had been to collect lots and lots of autumn leaves for our toddlers to paint and then make print paintings with. The weather Gods were against me though as autumn so far has been wet and rainy rather than crisp and cold resulting in leaves that were just a big soggy mush and not suitable for printing with.

Back to the drawing board and Little Imp was still very keen to have a painting craft so I decided that we would instead create our own autumn tree paintings using our fingerprints to make the autumn leaves.

The toddlers had a range of foam and bristle brushes and foam rollers to choose from to help them paint the tree trunk and branches, they then finger-painted the leaves onto and around their trees.  Some of them chose to add extras to their paintings as well like hedgehogs, robins and snowmen.  The final results were, I'm sure you'll agree, fantastic:

Happy singing and crafting and see you next week with some fabulous festive tunes :0) 🎅

L'automne week 2 - fireworks

Now, I know that bonfire night is an English tradition and not a French one but I found such a great song last year about fireworks that we had to sing it again.  For the lyrics and a link to the song on you tube check out my blog post from last November "Boum, Boum, Boum".

Our craft this week was to make firework pictures. To do this, we used pipe cleaners which we shaped into stars and spirals and used as stampers, cotton buds to dab little specks of colour and paintbrushes to splatter paint onto the black paper.

I think the results speak for themselves:

We hope you have fun making your own firework inspired pictures!

Happy singing and crafting! :0)

L'automne week 1 - umbrella pictures

After 2 weeks off and a week of lovely warm weather and sunshine on our half-term holiday, the cold, wet English weather we returned to seemed a good fit for our new topic of l'automne (autumn).

The songs which we will be singing over the next few weeks, before we get into the Christmas season!, include the following:

L'automne est un chanson de pluie,

Goutte, gouttelettes de pluie,

Il pleut, il mouille,

Meunier tu dors

Comptine des couleurs d'automne

And

Les feux d'artifices ( of course there had to be some reference to bonfire night!)

These are all songs which have featured previously in the blog with accompanying crafts so please have a browse for the lyrics and some more craft ideas :0)

This week we made umbrella pictures.  We used cupcake cases folded in half to make the umbrellas and pipe cleaners for the handles. We used felt, foam and cotton wool to make our rain clouds and glitter glue in silver, blue and white for the raindrops.  We then added some people or creatures under our umbrellas and added any other decorations we wanted.

Here are our finished pictures:

Happy crafting and singing! :0)

V’là le bon vent...

A change in the weather this week with the end of the snow but the appearance of very strong winds which has made Little Imp and I feel like we were going to take-off more than once!  It felt only right then that we should stick with the weather theme from last week and sing this week about the wind.

V’là le bon vent, is a traditional French children's song and Little Imp and I love it.  We have it on CD and it is one we often sing along to in the car - well we join in with the chorus anyway!  There are many verses and they are not very toddler friendly really so I decided that we would just focus on the chorus in the toddler session.  The lyrics in their entirity can be found on the momes website here though for anyone wants to give the whole song a try: http://www.momes.net/comptines/vent/lbon-vent.html

And if you are unsure of the tune, you can find it on Mama Lisa's website here: http://www.mamalisa.com/?t=es&p=3177&c=22

 

The chorus goes like this:

V’là le bon vent,

V’là le joli vent,

V’là le bon vent,

M’amie m’appelle.

V’là le bon vent,

V’là le joli vent,

V’là le bon vent,

M’amie m’attend.

 

A rough translation:

Here comes the good wind,

Here comes the pretty wind,

Here comes the good wind,

My love is calling me.

Here comes the good wind,

Here comes the pretty wind,

Here comes the good wind,

My love is waiting for me.

 

Our craft this week was to make a kite - not a real one that would fly but one we could display on the wall or use as a bookmark, etc.

 

To make your own you will need:

coloured card, wool or string, ribbons, colours, stickers, glitter, etc for decoration.

 

To make your kite:

Cut a kite shape from your card,

Stick a length of wool on to the back of the card,

decorate your kite using your colours, glitter, stickers etc,

Finally tie bows onto the wool using the ribbons.

 

Once we had made our kites we sang the song again this time making our kites fly around the singing circle :o)

 

Here are our fantastic kites for you to enjoy:

 

 

Happy singing and crafting! :o)

Il pleut, il mouille...

Il pleut, il mouille...  it really seems like that is all the weather is doing this week!  So following the recent autumn wet weather theme, this song was the perfect addition for our toddler group this week.

The actual song has several verses and is a little bit too complicated for out toddlers to sing.  I came across a lovely shortened version on the ELC "Fun with French" CD though which seemed perfect.

The lyrics are as follows:

Il pleut, il mouille,
C'est la fête à la grenouille,
Quand il ne pleuvra plus,
C'est la fête à la tortue!

Clearly a song about a frog needed a craft about a frog and I remembered seeing a pebble frog craft somewhere on the net.  A bit of googling and I found it again here: http://www.brimfulcuriosities.com/2010/07/city-dog-country-frog-by-mo-willems.html

To reproduce this craft at home you will need:

a pebble - a farily smooth frog body shaped one if you can find one!
some green craft foam
green paint
googly or sticker eyes
strong pva glue or (even better) glue dots

I found a great template for making the frogs legs here:
http://www.ziggityzoom.com/activity/frog-prince-rock-buddy 

And there is even a template for a crown here so if you have some yellow foam or card as well you can make your frog pebble into a frog prince!

The method is very simple - but pretty messy! - just cover your pebble in green paint and leave to dry.  Whilst it is drying cut your legs out of foam and then stick on your eyes and legs using the glue or glue dots.

In all the painty, messy fun this morning I forgot to take any pictures of the children's wonderful creations :o(  So all I have is one of Little Imp's Frog.  Anyone who was at toddlers this morning and wants to email me a picture of theirs I will add them.

So here is our creation:

 

Happy singing, pebble hunting and painting! 

 

 Emma and Little Imp :o)

Les feuilles sont tombées...

Sticking with the autumnal feel, this week's new song was all about the beautiful colours of autumn leaves and of course, we had an autumn leaf craft to accompany it. 

 

The song I chose is called "Comptine des couleurs d'automne" and it is sung to the tune of "See the little bunnies".  It is a lovely little song about the colours of autumn leaves and provides a great introduction to some less common colours like "rouge-bordeaux" and "dorées".  Little Imp and I had a lovely time collecting the leaves for our craft yesterday and describing their colours in French as we picked them up.  It was a brilliant activity in itself, lots of fun kicking the leaves and jumping in them with the added bonus of speaking someFrench as we described the leaves and exclaimed about the fun we were having!

 

 The lyrics to the song are as follows:

Je connais un arbre

Qui est dénudé

Car pendant l'automne

Les feuilles sont tombées.

Elles devenaient jaunes

Brunes et orangées

 
Vertes, rouge-bordeaux 

 
Et même dorées.

 

 

 

A rough translation would be:

 

 

I know a tree which is bare,

 

because in autumn the leaves have fallen.

 

 

They turned yellow, brown and orange,

 

green, burgundy and even golden.

 

 

Our craft activity this week was all my own idea - no really, it was!!  Well, I might have taken a little bit of inspiration from the brilliant Julia Donaldson and her "Stick man" story - but only a little bit!!  This week, we used the big bag of leaves and the other usual crafty bits - googly eyes, felt, cupcake cases, pipe cleaners, glitter glue, etc. to creat our very own leaf people.  A really simple but effective craft as you can see from our great autumn leaf people pictures below:

 

 

Little Imp and I hope that you have a fun week kicking up leaves and creating some leaf people of your own! :o)