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)

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky on Corporate State Capitalism