Monday 30 July 2012

Allez en vacances! Little Imp goes to France!

Last week, Little Imp and I, along with the rest of the family, spent a fabulous time enjoying the sunshine in France.  Trips to the beach and zoo and meals out in the local restaurants all provided plenty of opportunities to speak French and to learn some new vocabulary.   Of course, bonjour, merci and au revoir featured heavily - much to the delight of all the French people we met - and as Little Imp became more and more confident greeting and thanking people as we were out and about the responses of  "du mignon!" were abundant!  And really it was very cute to see and hear our little toddler chirruping away in French so happily! :o)

Here are a few ideas for introducing some holiday French - you don't even have to be in France!  This first post will focus on the beach with posts on the zoo and eating out to follow :o)

The beach provided a great source for new vocabulary and given the glorious weather, we spent plenty of time there giving lots opportunity to reinforce the new words throughout the week.  I introduced Little Imp to  the following words and used the opportunity to reinforce the colours that she is already pretty confident with now:

la plage - the beach
la mer - the sea
le sable - the sand
le seau - the bucket
la pelle - the spade
le château de sable - the sand castle
les douves de château - the castle moat
les coquiallges - the shells
le maillot de bain - swimming costume
le chapeau - hat



I named the items in English and in French before moving on to requests in French e.g. passe-moi le seau.  I used the verb passer since it is a cognate (so close to the English word pass) and therefore makes comprehension that much easier.  

We talked about the colours of things - La mer est de quelle couleur?  etc and moved on to requests involving more complicated vocabulary - Passe-moi la pelle rouge, etc.  

Collecting shells, building sandcastles and jumping waves all provided the opportunity to practice counting in French.






Tuesday 17 July 2012

Les roues du bus


Today’s new song is a French version of the wheels on the bus.  A song that I think all of our toddlers were already familiar with in English.  We sang in English first and came up with our actions for the different verses – by keeping the actions the same in both versions, the vocabulary becomes easier to absorb.  The repetitive and rythmical nature of the song along with the actions increases your little ones phonological awareness and they are quickly able to join in themselves with some of the words.  For the really young ones, just hearing the repeated sounds and the one-to-one interaction of doing the actions along with Mummy are helping to build that awareness of new sounds.
The version on the lingotunes cd is the one we sang to today and I would recommend this to anyone looking to download it themselves – the speed is just right for the children to be able to have a go at joining in with once they have got the hang of the lyrics.
The first verse goes like this:
Les roues du bus tournent et tournent,
tournent et tournent,
tournent et tournent,
les roues du bus tournent et tournent,
tous les jours.

Our craft activity today was decorating our own buses with people in the windows and lots of stickers, glitter, ribbons, bows, colouring in and pom poms.  What lovely colourful buses the children all made - apologies there aren't more pictures and that this post has taken so long to appear for some reason I don't quite understand all my pictures have been flipping upside down!!  Now that I have managed to get one to work, I am going to quit whilst I'm ahead!!  Fingers crossed for more success next time! :o)



Friday 6 July 2012

Savez vous planter les choux?


Do you know how to plant cabbages the way we do?

This funny, nonsense song was our new addition this week.  Sticking to the body parts theme, we had lots of fun singing about how we plant cabbages with different parts of our bodies!  

The song gave the opportunity to introduce some new body parts as well as reinforcing the ones from last week's song.  We had lots of giggles making up new verses to sing and act out!


If you would like to have a go singing at home, the lyrics are as follows:

Savez vous planter les choux
à la mode, à la mode?
Savez vous planter les choux
à la mode de chez nous?

Je les plante avec le doigt
à la mode, à la mode.
Je les plante avec le doigt
à la mode de chez nous.

You can then change the body part with each verse in whatever order you choose.  
For example:
la main - hand; la pouce - thumb; le bras - arm; le coude - elbow; le pied - foot; le genou - knee; l'oreille - ear; les dents - teeth; le nez - nose, etc.

If you are unsure of the tune, there are video clips on you-tube and several versions of the song which can be downloaded from itunes.

Our craft activity today linked to the song involved decorating plant pots and saucers with stickers, ribbons and foam shapes and planting some cabbage seeds.  We then made a little cabbage marker to remind us what is growing in our pots.

Here are the children’s fantastic decorated pots, planted up and ready to take home: