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The Paper Bag Princess Activities and Lesson Plans for 2025

Elementary teachers looking for lesson plans and activities for The Paper Bag Princess 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 self esteem and being respectful, this The Paper Bag Princess picture book by Robert Munsch 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 Paper Bag Princess Lesson Plans & Activities in 3 Easy Steps:

  1. Read a summary of The Paper Bag Princess. You can find it in the section below.
  2. 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.
  3. Download the book companion to make lesson planning simple with The Paper Bag Princess reading comprehension questions, writing prompts, teaching ideas & no-prep extension activities.

THE PAPER BAG PRINCESS SUMMARY

The Paper Bag Princess, is about a princess named Elizabeth. She lives in a castle, wears expensive princess clothes, and is going to marry Prince Ronald. That is, until a dragon comes and smashes the castle, burns her clothes, and carries Prince Ronald to a cave. Having only a paper bag to wear, Elizabeth chases after the dragon to save her prince.

When she gets to the cave, Elizabeth tricks the dragon into using all of his fire, and becoming so exhausted that he falls asleep. When Elizabeth enters the cave and saves Prince Ronald, his reaction is not what she expected. Instead of saying thank you, he tells her that she looks like a mess. Elizabeth tells him that he even though he is a prince he is behaving like a toad, and decides that she doesn’t need him anyways.

THE PAPER BAG PRINCESS LESSON PLAN IDEAS

Each of our 400+ 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 Paper Bag Princess, 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 Paper Bag Princess reading comprehension questions focus on:

  • making predictions
  • summarize/retell
  • analyzing character
  • ask and answer questions
  • sequencing
  • cause and effect
  • author’s purpose

LITERATURE-BASED SOCIAL EMOTIONAL LEARNING LESSONS

We found this story to be a great SEL picture book to promote:

  • self esteem
  • being respectful

GRAMMAR, VOCABULARY & WORD STUDY

  • action verbs
  • suffixes
  • quotation marks
  • shades of meaning

THE PAPER BAG PRINCESS 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
The Paper Bag Princess
elementary teacher reading aloud a picture book to her students

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The Paper Bag Princess book and activity

BOOK INFO FOR ELEMENTARY TEACHERS

What are the reading levels for The Paper Bag Princess?

  • Lexile® Measure: 510L
  • Guided Reading Level: N
  • DRA Level: 24-28
  • Accelerated Reader Level (ARC): 2.7-2.9

Who is the author? Who is the illustrator?

The book was written by Robert Munsch. It was illustrated by Michael Martchenko.

What genre is The Paper Bag Princess ?

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.

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