It is always fun to add a folktale into your read aloud rotation. Each Christmas I like to read The Legend of Old Befana to my students and this week we are spotlighting the story. It is really important that, as teachers, we expose students to many different genres and this book provides a great opportunity for that! - Jodi and the Starts With a Story Team
SUMMARY
The Legend of Old Befana os the story of an old women living in a small Italian village. Befana is not friendly and the people in the village do not like her very much. She spends her days baking and sweeping her house, steps, and walkway.
One night, Befana is awakened by a bright light outside, it is a star. The star shines so bright that Befana cannot sleep. The next day as Befana sweeps the walk, she sees an amazing procession of people. She learns that they are in search of the new Baby King that was just born. Eventually, Befana decides that she too will go in search of the king. She bakes treats to and brings her broom to sweep for the tired mother.
Befana runs as fast as she can to try and catch up to the group, however, she never finds the king. To this day, Old Befana spends each night running from house to house looking for the Baby King and sweeping children’s rooms.
USE THIS BOOK TO TEACH:
Folktales lend themselves to a huge variety of lessons! Since it’s a genre teachers most likely do not read as often, it gives students an opportunity to practice their skills and strategies with a different kind of text.
- Stop as you read the book and have students share their visualizations of the story.
- Practice identifying the main idea of the story and identifying the supporting details.
- Encourage students to get detailed with their writing and describe certain parts of the story in detail.
- Introduce expository writing and have students write explanations for events that took place in the book.
- Review adjectives, prepositions and quotation marks.
- Explore homophones throughout the book.
- Discuss the importance of compassion.
- Share examples of perseverance.
NO-PREP PRINTABLE ACTIVITIES:
If you are looking for “ready to go” activities for the first day of school, be sure to check out the book companion. With it you’ll receive all of the following resources to align with this specific book:
- comprehension questions
- 30 writing prompts with themed paper
- vocabulary activities
- word study print & go activities
- ideas for grammar lessons with focus sentence printables
- social emotional learning discussion topics
- graphic organizers to target specific comprehension skills and strategies
When planning a read aloud, I always felt like I had to decide if I wanted to get a resource for reading comprehension, writing, or grammar. It seemed like there wasn’t a comprehensive resource that included a variety of content areas. Not anymore! You can finally get everything you need for an awesome read aloud in just one resource!
GET THE PRINTABLE ACTIVITIES
ADDITIONAL BOOK SUGGESTIONS
You and your students will also love these similar books:
- The Art Lesson by Tomie dePaola
- The Legend of the Poinsettia by Tomie dePaola
- The Night Tree by Eve Bunting
- The Tomten by Astrid Lindgren
TRY OUT A SAMPLE COMPANION
It's hard to explain how amazing the Starts with a Story book companions are because there is just so much goodness included in each one. It's best if you experience using one for yourself. Sign up below & we'll send you an entire book companion to try out for FREE!
