Use The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf to strengthen your students' comprehension skills, build their vocabulary, and help them understand how words work.
This book lends itself to a lesson focused on asking questions because readers will naturally wonder what Ferdinand will do and how he feels throughout the story. Follow the page-specific prompts to help students ask meaningful questions then guide them to use evidence from the text to support their thinking about Ferdinand's choices and feelings.
Use The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf to help your students think about the author's purpose for writing this story. Through thinking about the characters and the events in the story, readers will learn to identify places in the text where the author is relaying messages or working to entertain his readers.
This special story about being yourself gives readers plenty of practice in making connections. By following the text-based questions included in this resource set, students will make text-to-self, text-to-world, and text-to-text connections to better relate to Ferdinand and understand his story.
Use The Story of Ferdinand and this set of resources to help readers take their thinking to a new level. The questions included in this lesson plan will help readers make logical predictions. Students will also learn how to check their predictions against the text to determine the accuracy of their predictions.
This retelling and summarizing lesson plan pairs perfectly with The Story of Ferdinand. It supports beginning readers as they learn to focus on the important story elements including characters, setting, events, and the problems in the text.
This resource set guides students to explore how the “bossy r” changes vowel sounds in words — especially the /ar/ sound as in cardc and the /or/ sound as in corn. With activities focused on r-controlled vowel words like farm, storm, hard, and corn, students will sort, read, and craft their own r-controlled words tied to Ferdinand’s calm pasture and flower-filled world. This set supports phonemic awareness and spelling practice while staying firmly connected to Ferdinand’s peaceful story of being true to himself and smelling flowers under his cork tree.
This set of vocabulary development resources for The Story of Ferdinand highlights the words that are most important for students to know and understand while reading the book. Through engaging in fun word games, matching words to definitions and pictures, and practicing how to categorize words, students will develop the vocabulary necessary to comprehend this story and many others.
In The Story of Ferdinand, we learned that Ferdinand was unique in his own special way. With this activity, students can celebrate Ferdinand's uniqueness by writing one of his unique traits on each flower petal. Afterward, they'll color and assemble their flower, creating a vibrant reminder of what makes Ferdinand—and themselves—one of a kind!
Read The Story of Ferdinand then have some fun matching cause and effect sentences from the book. By using these cause and effect cards, students will demonstrate both their comprehension of the text and their understanding of cause and effect relationships in a hands-on and interactive way.
This resource includes matching/sorting cards and a sorting mat for four cause and effect sentences in The Story of Ferdinand. Each cause card is marked with a square and each effect card is marked with a circle, making it easy to support students who struggle with matching cause and effect relationships.
Understanding cause and effect is a key comprehension and language skill. The text structure of The Story of Ferdinand includes several examples of cause and effect relationships, making it easy to use as a springboard for modeling or independent practice.
This simple resource includes four sentence stems. Each sentence stem presents an effect. Students will use what they know about the book to fill in the cause of the effect.
