BOCA BETH: One Song at a Time

BILINGUAL BOOKS ON SHAPES!!!

Let’s keep the lessons rolling this week with many people’s favorite I Know My Shapes / Yo sé mis formas from the Boca Beth bilingual music CD titled More Boca Beth / Más Boca Beth. This song is sung to the beat of / the melody of “Mary Had A Little Lamb” and is quite catchy to introduce five fun shapes to children ages one - five. (Though I have elementary aged school children who love, love, love this song!)

Here are the lyrics to this Spanish and English song:

Follow this link

And now the suggested activity to go hand in hand with our Boca Beth song! Many organizations have brought me in to conduct a Make and Take training that goes hand in hand with this fun bilingual song about shapes. Each attendee walks away with the five shapes sung about in this Boca Beth song in visual aid form with Spanish and English words attached to the shapes for the beginning reading portion of the program.

Early literacy……………..a big push in our country, and most administrators do not even realize that learning two languages before the age of five promotes early reading skills. It’s amazing! Let them know!

Circle time suggested activity: Finding shapes visual aides are easy ones to find with both Spanish and English words that I suggest you laminate to the sides of the shapes. When you laminate make certain to always place your English word on the same side of the visual aide each time and the Spanish word on the opposing side. We all know that children thrive on familiarity and knowing what to expect so make the words follow the same pattern each and every time.

During the song the children are asked to act like the shape we are singing about and told maybe they will get a chance to hold one of the shapes. We circle our hands around one another for “circle/círculo,” we walk in place like a “square/cuadrado,” we hop up and down like Tigger (what child doesn’t love to hop like Tigger?!?!?!) for “rectangle/rectangulo,” we dance like the “triangle/triangulo,” and then we fly like an airplane for “oval/ovalo.”

For the older children I had one teacher suggest the children draw the shape in the air as they sing about it! Cute alternative idea for the kinesthetic part of the learning!

At the end of the song I collect the shapes one by one repeating the English and the Spanish word for the shape adding more repetition. For example, “¿Donde esta el circulo? / Where is the circle?” and I will even tie in the color name of the shape since they are in different colors when purchased at Lakeshore Learning or when made with Boca Beth at our Make and Take workshop for in-service hours.

Happy Educating! ¡Sea feliz educando!

Boca Beth