bethtrach Last updated: 8 Simple Spanish Songs for Preschoolers
Spanish songs for preschoolers can make learning fun, easy and something kids actually look forward to!
Check out these eight great songs and suggestions for fun lessons built around them.
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Why Use Music in Your Spanish Classroom?
Music is a great technique for memorization, helping students remember words and phrases through catchy lyrics. Music can also put kids in a positive frame of mind for learning and provides a multisensory learning experience while making learning just plain fun.
Using music in your Spanish classes has the added benefit of allowing you to create authentic connections to the cultures of Spanish-speaking countries.
Spanish Songs for Preschoolers
There are hundreds of great Spanish songs out there, and you could search YouTube or Spotify all day long adding to your collection. To help you get started, check out these tried-and-true songs for preschoolers and some fun lesson plans to go with them!
1. “De Colores”
- Available on: YouTube
- Why It’s Great: This is considered by many to be a Mexican folk song, but it’s sung everywhere people speak Spanish. The verses about farm animals and different colors are great for preschoolers.
- Ideas for Lessons: For the youngest students, concentrate on the verse about the chickens when you teach farm animals. You can have kids make paper bag puppets to hold up for the gallo (rooster), gallina (hen) and pollitos (chicks) when they come up. You can also use this song as a jumping-off point for teaching other animal sounds in Spanish to show your kids just how different these onomatopoeic words can be.
Likewise, the verse that lists many colors is also popular. Have students hold up pieces of construction paper in the right color as they sing the words.
2. “Hojas, Hojas”
- Available on: Youtube
- Why It’s Great: This song lets kids practice their colors while tying them to the seasons. Building cross-thematic connections is a great way to embed the language deeper into your students’ young minds.
- Ideas for Lessons: As you teach students their colors, use a large cut out of a bare, brown tree on a magnet board or felt board. Have students practice their fall colors by placing their hojas (leaves) on the árbol (tree) as they name the colors. You can also add lessons about otoño (fall) and the types of weather during that season. Cap your seasonal lesson by teaching your students the song with the video.
3. “Un Elefante Se Balanceaba”
- Available on: Youtube
- Why It’s Great: The image of an elephant balancing on a spider web will have kids laughing, and this traditional children’s song is a great way to get kids to practice counting in a fun way.
- Ideas for Lessons: It’s easy to incorporate this song into a unit on animals because it allows you to introduce elefante (elephant) and araña (spider). It’s also a great way to practice counting—you can sing it as high as your kids can count, as those elephants will always want to call another friend over!
A fun way to drive the song home is to have students color and cut out a small picture of an elephant. Tape a spider web made of yarn to your whiteboard or bulletin board and have students add their artwork as they sing the song, counting up the number of elephants with each verse.
4. “La Calabaza Escondida”
- Available on: Youtube and Amazon (you can get the individual song or the whole album “Es Otoño, Caen Las Hojas, Vol. 3”)
- Why It’s Great: This song is perfect for Halloween as it talks about pumpkins feeling different emotions—think jack-o’-lanterns! It’s also incredibly catchy, making it a perennial favorite for learning how to answer Cómo estás? (How are you) beyond bien (fine), así-así (so so) and other basics.
- Ideas for Lessons: You can get a lot of mileage out of calabazas (pumpkins) in the fall if you use them to teach about size and colors using photos of all the different varieties.
You can also have students make jack-o’-lantern artwork and tell how their pumpkins are feeling using emotion vocabulary. To prep them for the song, show them jack-o’-lanterns that are triste (sad), enojado (angry) and cansado (tired). When you learn the song, have students act out each emotion with the music.
5. “Los Días”
- Available on: Youtube and Amazon (grab José-Luis Orozco’s whole album “Lirica Infantil: Letras, Números Y Colores – Vol. 5.”)
- Why It’s Great: Learning the days of the week in order is a skill for lifelong use, and it’s completely age-appropriate for preschoolers in their native and second languages. It also reinforces numbers one through seven.
- Ideas for Lessons: This song is short enough to sing every day at the beginning of class as part of an opening routine. Once your students memorize it, add a look at the calendar to your daily routine to reinforce the lesson.
As you ask questions like ¿Qué día es hoy? (What day is it today?) and ¿Qué día será mañana? (What day is tomorrow?), encourage kids to point to the days and sing the song to jog their memories. Over time, they’ll internalize the language and will no longer need the song—though they’ll probably still enjoy it!
6. “Si Estás Feliz”
- Available on: Youtube
- Why It’s Great: Being able to say how they’re feeling is an important skill for your students to learn. This song also comes with built-in actions like clapping and stomping which makes it more interactive and fun for kids.
- Ideas for Lessons: This is a good warm-up song to see how kids are feeling and get them moving before the lesson. To get more practice with the vocabulary, they can draw how they feel, create paper plate emojis or guess the emotion that you or other students act out. You can ask them questions about how they feel and have them hold up the corresponding emoji while saying it out loud.
In addition to feeling words, this song is a great introduction to action words with commands like “applaude” (clap), “zapatea” (stomp) and “di” (say). You can pair it with a game of Simón Dice (Simon Says) to continue with commands and actions.
7. “Los Pollitos”
- Available on: Youtube
- Why It’s Great: It’s short, simple and kids love to sing along with this song. It teaches a variety of verb structures and vocabulary like tienen hambre (they’re hungry) and tienen frío (they’re cold), as well as comida (food), abrigo (coat), alas (wings) and more. I still remember this song by heart from when we sang it in my Spanish classes in school!
- Ideas for Lessons: Teach gestures and actions that correspond to the lyrics, like flapping wings, opening and closing beaks, or imitating walking like chicks. You can also assign roles of chicks, mother hen and other farm animals. Act out the song while singing, fostering language practice and social interaction.
You can also incorporate this song into a lesson on rhyming. Highlight the rhyming words in the song and encourage children to identify them and come up with more.
8. “Las Ruedas de los Autobuses”
- Available on: Youtube (also available with English translation)
- Why It’s Great: This is an excellent song for preschoolers to learn Spanish because it combines catchy melodies with repetitive lyrics, reinforcing vocabulary, numbers and actions through an enjoyable and interactive experience.
- Ideas for Lessons: This song teaches words related to transportation, such as ruedas (wheels), autobus (bus) and ventanas (windows). You can use visual aids and props to reinforce understanding. The song also incorporates verbs like girar (to turn), ir (to go), abrir (to open), cerrar (to close) and hacer (to do/make). Encourage children to mimic the actions, enhancing motor skills and language comprehension.
For a crafting activity, have your students create paper bus cutouts, paper plate wheels or finger puppets of buses. Use them for storytelling and role-playing activities, encouraging creativity and language use.
If you love the idea of teaching with songs but want some extra support to reinforce the learning, you can use a program like FluentU. FluentU takes authentic videos, including children’s songs, and turns them into personalized language lessons with learning tools like interactive subtitles.
The program features tons of songs that are perfect for students of any age, so students can have a great time both singing and learning from catchy Spanish tunes!
If you’re ready to give these powerful, musical ideas a try, what are you waiting for?
Head off to class and start singing!
Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)
