Hi! My name is Claire the Square and I am so excited to talk to you about shapes today! Do you know who else loved shapes? The Ancient Egyptians! They loved them so much they used them instead of letters!!

These Egyptian hieroglyphs were a way for the ancient Egyptians to write things down. They used pictures and symbols to represent words and ideas, kind of like a secret code.
They would put these pictures together to make sentences and stories. They would write them on walls, papyrus and stone tablets. Some pictures represented a sound or a syllable, and others represented a whole word.
They were used in ancient Egypt for more than 3,500 years, but it was difficult to read and write, so only special people like priests and scribes could do it.
I bet you could do it though – try to write your name!