La cigüeña voló sobre la casa.

In standard Peninsular Spanish, cigüeña is pronounced roughly thee-GWEN-ya.

A few helpful parts:

• ci sounds like th in think in most of Spain.
• güe sounds like gwe.
• ñ sounds like ny in canyon.

So the whole word is approximately thee-GWEN-ya.
In many parts of Latin America, the first part would sound more like see-GWEN-ya.

They show that the u is pronounced.

In Spanish:

• gue and gui normally have a silent u.
  • Example: guerra = the u is not pronounced.
• güe and güi mean the u must be pronounced.
  • Example: cigüeña, pingüino.

So güe is pronounced gwe, not just ge.

Because cigüeña is a feminine noun, so it takes la.

That is a matter of grammatical gender. It does not automatically mean the bird is biologically female. In Spanish, animal names often have a grammatical gender even when the actual sex is unknown or irrelevant.

If you specifically wanted the masculine form, you could say el cigüeño.

Voló is the preterite tense, third person singular, from volar.

So it means he/she/it flew in the sense of a completed action in the past.

Here, La cigüeña voló sobre la casa presents the flight as a finished event.

The accent mark shows where the stress goes: vo-LÓ.

Without the accent, volo would follow the normal Spanish stress rule for words ending in a vowel, so it would be stressed on the next-to-last syllable: VO-lo.

Spanish therefore writes voló to show the correct past-tense form and pronunciation.

This is very common in the preterite:

• habló
• llegó
• comió
• vivió

Because voló and volaba do not mean exactly the same thing.

• voló = preterite, a completed event
• volaba = imperfect, an ongoing, repeated, or background action

So:

• La cigüeña voló sobre la casa = the stork flew over the house, seen as one finished action.
• La cigüeña volaba sobre la casa = the stork was flying over the house, or used to fly over the house.

An English speaker often thinks both can translate as flew or was flying, but Spanish chooses between them very carefully.

Here, sobre means over or above.

It shows that the stork was flying in a position higher than the house. It does not mean the stork was physically on top of the house.

In other contexts, sobre can also mean other things, such as about:

• un libro sobre arte = a book about art

But with volar, sobre naturally means over.

Because Spanish normally uses an article with a noun like this.

La casa means the house, referring to a specific house.

If you said sobre casa, it would sound incomplete or unnatural here. Spanish usually wants:

• la casa = the house
• una casa = a house

So if the house is specific or understood from context, la casa is the natural choice.

No. La casa is not the direct object of voló.

In this sentence:

• voló is the verb
• sobre la casa is a prepositional phrase
• la casa is the object of the preposition sobre

So the sentence is describing where the flying happened, not what was directly acted on.

Yes.

A few natural alternatives are:

• Sobre la casa voló la cigüeña.
  This changes the word order for emphasis. It sounds more literary or focused on over the house.

• La cigüeña sobrevoló la casa.
  This uses the verb sobrevolar, which means to fly over. It is very close in meaning and is also correct.

The original sentence, La cigüeña voló sobre la casa, is a very normal and neutral way to say it.