Heartbeat by: Sharon Creech (Realistic Fiction)

The book is about a young girl named Annie who loves to run.  She runs barefoot and only for enjoyment, which causes her to despise the thought of running to compete on a team.  Her parents are having a new baby and she is nervous and excited at the same time.  Her grandpa has a hard time remembering things, but Annie always has a way of making him feel more comfortable.  She saves her money to help her best friend, Max, buy new running shoes and he returns the favor by getting her art supplies to draw.  She practices drawing the same apple one hundred times and drawing the apple becomes harder with each successive drawing.  

I would use this book to help teach students some of the elements of literature.  The book discusses footnotes and how to use them, and I could allow class time for the students to practice using footnotes in their writing or adding footnotes to other books.  I could also discuss the importance of using a wide vocabulary since Annie often times uses a thesaurus to help her find more exciting words.  I would ask the students to choose twenty words from the story and use the thesaurus to find better words to replace them with.  I would allow the students to gain practice writing in a different style than the typical paragraph structures by asking them to mimic the author’s style using their own writing.  Each sentence is broken up into multiple lines and constructed in a particular way and the students would have a chance to explore Sharon Creech’s writing style.  I could also ask the students to explore the way dialogue is used in the story since the author chooses to use italics to represent quotations rather than quotation marks. 

AR Book Finder Book Level 5.0