Beauty and the Beast” is, along with “The Ugly Duckling” and “The Little Mermaid,” a popular fairy tale that has an author. While it has been suggested that “Cupid and Psyche” must be the original “Beauty and the Beast,” the story that we know was written by Madame Leprince de Beaumont as a cautionary tale for girls. Madame de Villenueve wrote a precursor to the tale, and there are a number of folk tales from around the world with similar stories.
In this story, there is a handsome prince who has been enchanted into the shape of a fearsome beast until a beautiful maiden loves him for himself alone, not for his good looks, intelligence, and riches. He is living in a beautiful palace in the middle of a forest. One day, a merchant is driven to take shelter in his castle by a snowstorm. The merchant has three daughters, two of whom are ill-natured girls, but the third is called “Beauty,” and she is sweet and virtuous, and loves to read. When the merchant set out on his journey, the two older girls asked him to bring them fancy clothes, but Beauty just asked for a rose.
The merchant takes shelter in the castle and spends the night there without seeing the Beast. As he leaves, he picks a rose from the beautiful garden, to take to Beauty. The Beast jumps out and threatens to kill him. The merchant pleads for his life, and the Beast says he will spare the merchant’s life if he will send one of his daughters in his place. The merchant pretends to agree, and goes home to say goodbye to his daughters. He intends to go back to the Beast’s castle once he has his affairs in order.
Beauty insists on going in the merchant’s palace, and the Beast treats her well, although he asks her to marry him every day. He even allows her to go home and visit her family. While she is gone, the Beast nearly dies of despair, but Beauty returns in time to save his life. She tells him she will marry him, and thus ends the enchantment.
Predictably enough, they live happily ever after.
Kinuko Y. Craft has done a charming picture book of Beauty and the Beast.
Jan Brett is another favorite author of ours, and her Beauty and the Beast is also beautiful.
Robert Sabuda’s Beauty & the Beast: A Pop-up Book of the Classic Fairy Tale is as wonderful as the rest of his books.
Disney also has a cartoon version of the tale. It’s available as a DVD or streaming from Amazon.
This is a complicated story and a good choice for older students. Once you’ve read a few versions and retold the story to check comprehension, you’re ready for curriculum connections.
Math
There’s not much math in the story, frankly, but the internet has a surprising number of math connections available. Pick some to use for your math lessons while you’re enjoying the story.
- The video above gives a clear, relatable example of a fairly complex mathematical point.
- Twinkl has a nice collection of math worksheets with a Disney Beauty and the Beast theme.
- Dot to dot sheets help with counting and recognizing written numerals.
- Also using Disney images, a nice analog clock lesson for telling time.
- Time tables practice book with a Disney theme
All these math resources use images from the Disney movie. What can we say? Our little girls loved Disney’s Belle enough to wear the costume on a wintery Halloween. She’s relatable and a good role model, so why not go with it?
Our favorite math connection for the Disney version is graphing. Belle loves books, but data from the U.S. shows that Americans don’t read much and the number of books read is getting smaller each year. Use data from these sites to create graphs showing how much we read in the U.S. :
If you check out the sites above, you’ll see that about 40% of American adults did not read even one book in 2025. 4% of us read more than 50 books in a year. Since the two ends of the continuum are extreme, the average number of books read is 8. Here’s YouGov’s graph for this information:
There’s more data to graph at the links we shared. But this is also a great time to graph information about books in your own environment or community:
- Ask family members, friends, and others in your community how many books they read in a year.
- Count and sort the number of books in your home, Kindle, or other collection into categories. Make a graph: do you have more cookbooks, more novels, more schoolbooks, or more nonfiction books? The Storygraph example below does this by books’ moods, and we can see that this reader likes funny books a lot more than sad ones.
- Track how many books your kids read in a year. We like the Storygraph app for this. It constructs the graphs for us, but it’s good practice for reading graphs.
Both the graphs we’ve shared with you are bar graphs. Notice that they can be vertical or horizontal. Try both ways and see if one works better for some information than the other.
Critical Thinking
- This is an excellent story to use with older students for comparison with other fairy and folk tales. Consider “The Frog Prince” and “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” or Lawrence Yep’s The Dragon Prince: A Chinese Beauty & the Beast Tale. Bring out the Venn Diagrams!
- Most students will be familiar with the Disney version of this story, and that will also make an interesting comparison. Consider that the Disney studio wanted the story to make a good movie. Were the changes they made — adding and removing characters, etc. — required for that purpose?
Character Education
- Beauty is beautiful, hardworking, and virtuous, as fairy tale heroines usually are. She is also studious and intelligent. So is the Beast. Their interest in books is specifically mentioned in the story. This is unusual in fairy tales. Have students compare “Beauty and the Beast” with other fairy tales they’ve read, and decide whether Beauty is actually more intelligent than the average heroine, or if the author is unusual in having mentioned her intelligence.
- The Beast has to hide his intelligence and good looks as part of the enchantment, so that Beauty can only love him for his kindness and good character. Is her physical beauty just a coincidence, or does this reflect a double standard for males and females? Do we still have such a double standard?
- The older sisters in the story are portrayed as proud and vain. Some retellings of the story also explain that the handsome prince has been turned into a Beast because of his pride, and has to discover how hard it is to impress people without his outward appearance. Is the importance of humility and virtue the moral of the story? If so, do students agree that it is a good moral? Many Americans today would not. Consider a debate on the subject.
Social Studies
- Another way in which this story is unusual is in having a merchant as a main character. Most fairy tales involve peasants and royalty, but “Beauty and the Beast” reflects the rise of the middle class in Europe. If you are studying this in your social studies classes, bring this story in for an interesting economics/literature connection.
- This story comes from France originally, and the Disney version is set in France. How can you tell? The opening song, “Bonjour,” is a good place to look for clues.
- Check out our lesson plans on France:
- Beauty is not a passive heroine in this story. Does the difference between Beauty and, say, Cinderella show changes in the world between the 17th century when Cinderella was written and the 18th century Beauty, or is it the difference between a male author and a female one — or some thing else entirely? Challenge students to research this question and write persuasive essays supporting their answers.
Science
- The Beast in the various illustrations for this story is depicted as something like a bear, a walrus, a warthog, or some other animal. Have students scour books, magazines,and the internet for pictures of unusual animals on which they might like to base their idea of the Beast. Challenge them to draw their own versions of the Beast, incorporating and labeling characteristics of the real-life animal they chose.
- Here’s Josepha’s ideas of the beastliest beasts. Watch the video above and challenge kids to make a Top Ten Beastliest Beasts list of their own.
Music
- “Beauty and the Beast” has been made into a Broadway musical (Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: The Broadway Musical) by Alan Menken and an opera (La Belle & La Bete) by Philip Glass. Both these works were based on movies. Discuss the place of movies in modern culture.
- ReadWriteThink has a lesson plan on movie music that could make a great homework assignment.
- There is also a ballet of “Beauty and the Beast” choreographed by David Nixon, using music from a collection of important modern composers: Saint-Säens, Poulenc, Bizet, Debussy, Fauré, and Mussorgsky, among others. Take the opportunity to let kids listen to and research these composers.
Art
- Corey Jensen has made a paper doll of the Disney version of the story. Have students make more clothes for Belle, create dolls of other characters from the story, or make their own idea of Beauty.
- Create a Lego Beauty and the Beast castle with the characters and decor from the movie. Enjoy the creative experience of building the castle and designing the interior.
