Strega Nona by Tomie dePaola

(Graded Reader)

This is yet another book that I was familiar with from childhood, which I repurposed for Story Time in my classroom.

It wasn't an ideal fit for the ESL classroom.  Although it's a children's book, the language is very advanced.  A lot of the vocabulary is low frequency, and a lot of the sentence structures are very complex.

(Yet more proof that children's books do not always equal graded language).

But the pictures in this book were so good that the pictures alone largely conveyed the story.

When reading this book aloud to my class, I also did my best to read it as dramatically as possible, so as to further convey meaning by inflection, stress, intonation, et cetera.

The first half of the book is a all setting the scene, and I was worried that my students would lose interest.  But they put up with it for the most part.

This book is available on amazon.com here.

I also used this youtube video here to supplement the book.



Here are some supplementary teaching materials I made when teaching this book in my classes.  These materials don't really work too well independently of the actual book, so you'll need to get a copy of the book to use these.

Google Slides: Part 1 (slides, pub) 2 (slides, pub) 3 (slides, pub) complete: slides, pub

Worksheets: Part 1 (docs, pub) 2 (docs, pub) 3 (docs, pub)

Updates: Using Strega Nona to Teach Noun Clauses

Strega Nona Slideshow (originally from this post HERE): slides, pub

Gapfill: docs, pub

Slideshow for feedback--first version including relative clauses: slides, pub

Second version with [what I think are] only 6 noun clauses (see caveats above): slides, pub

Video on Youtube: HERE 

Lesson Plan (for sharing with my co-teacher): docs, pub

General comprehension questions (these were made by my co-teacher): docs, pub

Update: scrambled sentences (an alternative to the gapfill worksheets): docs, pub

Using Strega Nona to Teach the Difference Between Defining and Non-Defining Relative Clauses 

Strega Nona slideshow (originally from this post HERE): slides, pub

Specific information questions (these were made by my co-teacher--and originally from this post): docs, pub

Relative clause sentences: docs, pub

Full text gap-fill: docs, pub

Video on Youtube: HERE 

Kahoot: Strega Nona Relative Clauses

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Noam Chomsky on Corporate State Capitalism