Elementary teachers looking for lesson plans and activities for The Legend of Old Befana will find this post helpful. It includes resource recommendations, free teaching ideas, and information about the book. You’ll have everything you need to deliver engaging interactive read aloud lessons based on this story.
With themes of perseverance and compassion, this The Legend of Old Befana picture book by Tomie dePaola is a favorite in 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade classrooms. It will be a big hit in your classroom too! Learn more about this book below!
Engage Your Students with The Legend of Old Befana Lesson Plans & Activities in 3 Easy Steps:
- Read a summary of The Legend of Old Befana. You can find it in the section below.
- Check out the teaching ideas for reading comprehension strategies, grammar topics and social emotional learning skills that can be taught using this children’s book.
- Download the book companion to make lesson planning simple with The Legend of Old Befana reading comprehension questions, writing prompts, teaching ideas & no-prep extension activities.
THE LEGEND OF OLD BEFANA SUMMARY
The Legend of Old Befana is the story of an old woman 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 brightly 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 too, 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.
THE LEGEND OF OLD BEFANA LESSON PLAN IDEAS
Each of our 600+ Starts With a Story book companions come with a teacher’s guide to make lesson planning quick and easy, printable worksheets and digital resources that cover ALL of the standards-based reading comprehension skills.
When it comes to writing lesson plans and finding activities for The Legend of Old Befana, we’ve already done all of the heavy lifting for you.
We found this book was especially good at teaching the topics listed below.
READING COMPREHENSION QUESTIONS
The text-based The Legend of Old Befana reading comprehension questions focus on:
- making inferences
- summarize/retell
- visualizing
- analyzing character
- identify the main idea
- cause and effect
LITERATURE-BASED SOCIAL EMOTIONAL LEARNING LESSONS
We found this story to be a great SEL picture book to promote:
- perseverance
- compassion
GRAMMAR, VOCABULARY & WORD STUDY
- adjectives
- prepositions
- quotation marks
- homophones
THE LEGEND OF OLD BEFANA ACTIVITIES
You’ll receive all of the following resources aligned to the story:
- 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
YOU HAVE 2 OPTIONS! WHERE WOULD YOU LIKE TO PURCHASE THIS BOOK COMPANION?
BOOK INFO FOR ELEMENTARY TEACHERS
What are the reading levels for The Legend of Old Befana?
- Lexile® Measure: 460L
- Guided Reading Level: N
- DRA Level: 30
- Accelerated Reader Level (ARC): 2.9
Who is the author? Who is the illustrator?
The book was written and illustrated by Tomie dePaola.
What genre is The Legend of Old Befana ?
It is a fiction book. You may want to check out our genre activities or read our blog post, How to Teach Genre to Elementary Students.
How many pages are in the book?
The story is 32 pages long.
