A big bowl of steaming pasta and a little old lady with a magic touch. That combination provides comfort and a bit of nostalgia to many. Tomie dePaola recognizes this and created Strega Nona, a little old woman who is well known in her village for solving people’s troubles with her magic touch. She has become a beloved character in a series of books, and she teaches the reader some important lessons.
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people in the village, but she decides that she is getting older and needs some help as well. So she hires Big Anthony to help take care of her home. When she leaves to visit her friend, she leaves Big Anthony behind, but warns him not to touch the magic pasta pot. When he decides to try the magic pasta pot on his own, chaos ensues!
To bring the story of Strega Nona and her pasta pot alive for kids, there are several learning opportunities you can create!
Sight Word Practice
Sight Word Spaghetti – To encourage kids to practice their sight words while incorporating the yummy pasta from the story, you can create sight word spaghetti to share with your kids. This idea comes from Mrs. Bremer’s Kindergarten blog. She wrote out sight words for the kids on brown paper “meatballs”. She added these to a large bowl full of yellow yarn “spaghetti” and had the students use tongs to pull out a meatball.
Since my daughter is only 2, I changed this game up to suit her skill level. You can easily adapt this for younger children by putting letters or numbers on the meatballs and have them identify what letter or number they pulled out of the pasta. She had a lot of fun searching for the letter meatballs and pulling them out of the pasta.
Spaghetti Letters – This is a fun sensory experience as well as practice with letter or number recognition. Give kids a pile of yellow yarn or cooked and cooled spaghetti noodles. Give them a letter of the alphabet or a number and have them make it using their “noodles”. For younger kids, you could also write out numbers or letters on sheets of paper and have them lay their pasta over it to trace it. If the real pasta sticks to the paper, place the sheets into a Ziploc bag to create a barrier.
Make Your Own Pasta
Cook Dinner Together – Cooking with your kids can provide a variety of leaning opportunities, plus it can help you to create some great memories. A big bowl of pasta would be an easy dish to make with kids, and they can customize it to suit their tastes. Whether your kids are reading the recipe, carefully cutting up ingredients or measuring ingredients, they will be learning important skills and reinforcing important concepts. My daughter loves to help us in the kitchen, and she is a huge fan of pasta (especially with Parmesan cheese!).
Rainbow Pasta – To take the story of Strega Nona
There are so many fun activities you can create to bring the world of Strega Nona
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I love this book, it is such a great story from my childhood with a great story, funny plot and a must read!
It is one of my favorites as well!
My little guy has just stated to like pasta so I’m pretty excited to try these activities with him. Thanks!
I hope you have fun with them! My daughter loves pasta of all kinds lately!
So creative! So many of my teacher friends would love this!
I hope they do!
I love Strega Nona and the yarn idea is priceless! I don’t think I’ve read this one to my own kids so into my cart it goes! Thanks so much for the suggestion and the post.
I hope you have fun with it! He is one of my favorite authors, and this is one of my favorites!
This is great. We love pasta in our house and we love books.
This is the perfect combination!
Ooh what a good idea to use yarn to form letters! It’s the simplest of ideas I love the most.
Thanks, Me too! I like to try to use what we have around the house.
Nothing like homemade pasta! So much fun!
This is such a cute idea. I think I read this book as a kid but I can’t quite remember.
Thank you!
I love the idea of the meatballs and pasta alphabet game! Oh, and I LOVE Strega Nona.
Me too! I am a big Tomie dePaola fan!
This is such a fun idea! Can’t wait to try this out. Enjoyed reading – thanks so much for sharing 🙂
Thank you! We had fun with it!
Oh my stars! This is SO cute. I want to do this with my kiddos this month. Thanks for sharing
Thank you! I hope you enjoy it!
Love the sight word spaghetti idea! I am definitely going to give that a whirl with my three year old, but we will change it to letters and numbers. He loves play food, so he’ll be all over this! Thanks for sharing!
My daughter had a lot of fun with it! I hope your son does too!
I never knew of this book. Would love to get now for my sin. The ide and teh concept is really great in the book. The way it explains words is just perfect to help kids memorise. Thanks for sharing
It’s one of my favorites from growing up! Definitely recommend it!
DIY pasta for kids seems so much fun!
Sounds like great book! I will have to get one! Thanks for sharing!
Book inspired activities are the best. You found some fun ways to explore the story of Strega Nona!
Thanks! We had a lot of fun with them!
Wow! This brings back memories of Strega Nona from my childhood. Can’t wait to share with little ones one day.
I love sharing books with my daughter that were favorites of mine growing up!
My kids are obsessed with Mac n cheese so a pasta book would be so fun! You always find great reading treasures!
Aw, thank you! Tomie dePaola is one of my favorite authors and Strega Nona was always one of my favorite characters!