¡Hola! Welcome back to your Spanish course.
In our last lesson, you learned how to identify five basic colors. You can now point to a toy and say if it's rojo or azul. Today, we'll continue building your descriptive skills by learning to talk about shapes. This is another fantastic tool for your conversations with your son, especially during playtime with blocks, books, and drawings.
Our goal for this lesson is to identify four basic shapes in Spanish: círculo (circle), cuadrado (square), triángulo (triangle), and estrella (star).
1. The Vocabulary of Shapes: Las Formas
Let's start with the new words. The Spanish word for "shapes" is las formas.
Here are the four key shapes for today. Notice that, just like other objects, they have a gender, so we use el or la. This connects back to what we learned in our first module.
- el círculo (ehl SEER-koo-loh) - the circle
- el cuadrado (ehl kwah-DRAH-doh) - the square
- el triángulo (ehl tree-AHN-goo-loh) - the triangle
- la estrella (lah ehs-TRAY-yah) - the star
This chart is a great visual summary of these shapes and their Spanish names.
Pronunciation Tip: The double 'll' in estrella is pronounced like the 'y' in "yes" in most of the Spanish-speaking world.
2. Seeing Shapes in the Real World
One of the best ways to learn these words is to see them in everyday objects, just like your son does. The following video is made for toddlers and does a wonderful job of pointing out shapes around the house.
Spanish Shapes for Babies and Toddlers: Exploring and Learning through Music and Play!
Let's watch parts of the video 'Spanish Shapes for Babies and Toddlers' from the channel Spanish with Liz. It connects each shape to a real-world object, which makes them easier to remember.
Watch the following short clips. Try to repeat the Spanish word for the shape each time you hear it. Watch from 00:43 to 01:00 to learn cuadrado (square). Watch from 01:24 to 01:40 to learn triángulo (triangle). Watch from 01:40 to 02:02 to learn estrella (star). Watch from 02:34 to 02:50 to learn círculo (circle).
Seeing a window as a cuadrado or the sun as a círculo helps lock the words in your memory and gives you an immediate way to use them with your son.
3. Let's Play: Finding Shapes
Now, let's learn a practical phrase you can use to turn this vocabulary into a game. A fun and simple activity is "I spy" for shapes.
The article "Exploring Shapes in Spanish" suggests a great activity called "Find that shape". The key phrase is:
¿Dónde está...? (Where is...?)
You can use this to play with your son anywhere.
¿Dónde está el círculo?(Where is the circle?)¿Dónde está el cuadrado?(Where is the square?)¿Dónde está el triángulo?(Where is the triangle?)¿Dónde está la estrella?(Where is the star?)
You can point to shapes in a book, on his toys, or even on food. A slice of pizza can be a triángulo, and a plate can be a círculo.
To answer, you can simply point and say what it is:
Es un círculo.(It's a circle.)Es una estrella.(It's a star.)
Test your understanding!
Imagine you are playing with your son and you see a square-shaped block. How would you ask him to find it in Spanish?
Show answer
You would ask: ¿Dónde está el cuadrado?
Key Takeaways
¡Buen trabajo! You've just learned another fundamental category of words for talking about the world with your child.
- The four basic shapes are:
el círculo,el cuadrado,el triángulo, andla estrella. - You learned that most of these are masculine (
el), butestrellais feminine (la). - A great phrase for practice is
¿Dónde está...?to turn learning into a game.
This image is another fun, colorful summary of the shapes we learned.
Next Steps
Now you can identify objects by color and shape! In our next lesson, we will learn how to ask ¿Cuántos hay? (How many are there?). This will allow you to combine all these skills, for example, to find and count "two red squares" (dos cuadrados rojos).
¡Hasta luego