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The Story of Ferdinand Activities and Lesson Plans for 2025

Elementary teachers looking for lesson plans and activities for The Story Of Ferdinand 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 individuality, this The Story Of Ferdinand picture book by Munro Leaf 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 Story Of Ferdinand Lesson Plans & Activities in 3 Easy Steps:

  1. Read a summary of The Story Of Ferdinand. 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 Story Of Ferdinand reading comprehension questions, writing prompts, teaching ideas & no-prep extension activities.

THE STORY OF FERDINAND SUMMARY

Ferdinand was a small bull who was different than all the other bulls. He preferred to sit quietly under a tree and smell the flowers. The other young bulls spent their days running, jumping and butting heads. Ferdinand was not interested in that. His mother worried that he was lonesome, but when she realized he was happy being alone, she let him be.

Overtime, Ferdinand grew to be big and strong. One day, Ferdinand was stung by a bee when men were at the pasture to choose a bull for the bullfights. As Ferdinand started to jump and butt around, they thought he was the fiercest bull and took him to Madrid for the fight. However, when Ferdinand entered the ring, everyone was disappointed to see that he would not fight. He only wanted to sit quietly and smell the flowers. The fighters were mad and disappointed so they took Ferdinand home.

THE STORY OF FERDINAND 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 Story Of Ferdinand, 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 Story Of Ferdinand reading comprehension questions focus on:

  • making predictions
  • analyzing character
  • analyzing illustrations
  • plot (problem-solution)
  • identifying theme, message and moral
  • summarize/retell

LITERATURE-BASED SOCIAL EMOTIONAL LEARNING LESSONS

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

  • individuality

GRAMMAR, VOCABULARY & WORD STUDY

  • action verbs
  • base words
  • suffixes
  • synonyms

THE STORY OF FERDINAND 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 Story of Ferdinand
elementary teacher reading aloud a picture book to her students

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The Story of Ferdinand activity

BOOK INFO FOR ELEMENTARY TEACHERS

What are the reading levels for The Story Of Ferdinand?

  • Lexile® Measure: AD760L
  • Guided Reading Level: R-S
  • DRA Level: 40-42
  • Accelerated Reader Level (ARC): 4.5-4.7

Who is the author? Who is the illustrator?

The book was written by Munro Leaf. It was illustrated by Robert Lawson.

What genre is The Story Of Ferdinand?

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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