Elementary teachers looking for lesson plans and activities for Listening With My Heart will love this post. It includes resource recommendations and tons of great information about the book.
With themes of kindness and managing stress and anxiety, this Listening With My Heart picture book by Gabi Garcia is a favorite in 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade classrooms.
Engage Your Students with Listening With My Heart Lesson Plans & Activities in 3 Easy Steps:
- Read a summary of Listening With My Heart.
- Check out the teaching ideas for reading comprehension strategies, grammar topics and social emotional learning skills that can be taught using this children’s book.
- Download the book companion to make lesson planning simple with Listening With My Heart reading comprehension questions, writing prompts, teaching ideas & no-prep extension activities.
LISTENING WITH MY HEART SUMMARY
The story Listening With My Heart is about a girl named Esperanza who finds a heart shaped rock. She tells herself that she is going to use the heart to remind herself to listen with her heart with everything she does. Using the rock, she rescues a kitten and is friendly to Bao when he doesn’t have anyone to play with.
Esperanza is excited for the school play and is devastated when she falls down and forgets her lines. She hides backstage and discovers the rock has broken. Bao gives Esperanza a picture that says friend, and Esperanza learns that she hasn’t been a friend to herself.
Esperanza goes home and focuses on her favorite things to help herself feel better and be a friend to herself.
LISTENING WITH MY HEART LESSON PLAN IDEAS
Each of our 400+ Starts With a Story book companions come with a teacher’s guide to make lesson planning quick and easy, printable worksheets and digital resources that cover ALL of the standards-based reading comprehension skills.
When it comes to writing lesson plans and finding activities for Listening With My Heart, we’ve already done all of the heavy lifting for you.
We found this book was especially good at teaching the topics listed below.
READING COMPREHENSION QUESTIONS
The text-based Listening With My Heart reading comprehension questions focus on:
- identifying the main idea
- analyzing character
- summarize/retell
- author’s purpose
LITERATURE-BASED SOCIAL EMOTIONAL LEARNING LESSONS
We found this story to be a great SEL picture book to promote:
- kindness
- managing stress and anxiety
GRAMMAR, VOCABULARY & WORD STUDY
- action verbs
- proper nouns
- types of sentences
LISTENING WITH MY HEART ACTIVITIES
You’ll receive all of the following resources aligned to the story:
- comprehension questions
- 30 writing prompts with themed paper
- vocabulary activities
- word study print & go activities
- ideas for grammar lessons with focus sentence printables
- social emotional learning discussion topics
- graphic organizers to target specific comprehension skills and strategies
YOU HAVE 2 OPTIONS! WHERE WOULD YOU LIKE TO PURCHASE THIS BOOK COMPANION?
BOOK INFO FOR ELEMENTARY TEACHERS
What are the reading levels for Listening With My Heart?
- Lexile® Measure: AD640L
- Guided Reading Level: L
- DRA Level: 20 – 24
- Accelerated Reader Level (ARC): 3.7
Who is the author? Who is the illustrator?
The book was written by Gabi Garcia. It was illustrated by Ying Hui Tan.
What genre is Listening With My Heart?
It is a fiction book. You may want to check out our genre activities or read our blog post, How to Teach Genre to Elementary Students.
How many pages are in the book?
The story is 32 pages long.
