Learning French Nursery Rhymes

The girls have been teaching us French nursery rhymes over the past couple of weeks. Both of them go to a public  crèche just across the road from us, regulated by the Bureau d'information petite enfance or BIPE. This means they are the only English speaking kids in the place, and so they are learning French like crazy! About ten or twelve days  ago the two of them came home signing about trois petits chats and a chapeau d'paille. A repetitive, but nonetheless brilliant song that took us a few days to figure out was indeed about three little cats.  For the life of us we couldn't work out what shepherd's pie had to do with the song. But I've been reliably informed it's a straw hat!  Now, brilliantly and thanks to my girls, I know the words for hat and straw, thus we've been learning French from nursery rhymes along with the girls.

It did help that we found a useful source in the scouting movement who, always prepared provide a catalogue of nursery rhymes in French!

Because both the girls know the songs so well, but they are in different classes, I like to imagine the chaos of the assemblies, where the kids are all gathered together to learn the songs. Rows of small children sat down on the carpet in the crèche avidly listening to someone with a guitar teach them these songs.  I reckon there are probably a few tears and squabbles as best buds elbow each other in the face whilst trying to get the actions right. Though from what I've seen most of the actions are involve vaguely waving your hands in the air whilst muttering a line of the song. The thought of the vague confusion of thirty small children and their abstract curiosity as they wonder what's going on, makes me smile.

When we'd got a bit of a handle on all the little cats the big one broke out into a rendition of Si tu aimes le soleil, which goes to the tune of "If you're happy and you know it" and involves the waking up of autumn, so we've learnt how to say if and wake up, which, incidentally is a word I've been struggling with for ages. For instance when you get to nursery and the nurses ask comment va tu? to either of the girls, usually the answer has something to do with how well they've slept, but I always have to say elle dormait jusqua Sept heure et demi instead of elle reveillait a sept heure et demi. Who knows what the difference really is, but it's nice now to be able to say she woke up, instead of she slept until.  It's like I said recently, if you want to learn French, then mix your source and get out there and just use it.