TeachKind Rescue Stories: Idabelle’s Great Escape (Grades K-2)

Carly the Cow presenting to a large group of children, everyone is raising their hands — Carly the cow event at Broadmoor Elementary

Has Carly the cow visited your school yet? If so, you and your students know all about the sophisticated emotional lives of cows and that sanctuaries are a safe and comfortable place for them. (If not, send us an e-mail at [email protected] to find out when Carly will be in your neighborhood.)

Stories of humans helping other animals are all over the internet, and sharing them with your students is an excellent way to encourage kindness both in and out of the classroom. Because most children naturally feel compassion for animals, sharing rescue stories is a great way to engage and motivate different types of learners and encourage them to take action to help end animal abuse.

Each TeachKind Rescue Stories reading comprehension worksheet tells a different animal’s tale of transformation and features key vocabulary words and questions in order to encourage literal, inferential, and evaluative thinking. These worksheets were used in a study that found that students who read passages about having compassion for animals performed significantly better on Common Core–aligned assessments, demonstrating that instructional time need not be sacrificed in order to instill empathy in young people!

Use the TeachKind Rescue Stories reading comprehension worksheet below to help students in grades K through 2 learn more about cows and understand that no animals deserve to suffer for our food. This rescue story is centered around the story of Idabelle, a pregnant cow who jumped off a boat and swam to safety.

Idabelle and her son, Jimmy, happy to be together. — Idabelle and her son, Jimmy, are happy to be together.

Use other TeachKind resources to build an entire lesson around Idabelle’s rescue story—it can be easily incorporated into your next language arts unit and is great for English-language learners, too. You can use this worksheet to address the following Common Core English language arts standards:

Kindergarten

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.K.1
With prompting and support, ask and answer questions about key details in a text.

Grade 1

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.1.1
Ask and answer questions about key details in a text.

Grade 2

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.2.1
Ask and answer such questions as who, what, where, when, why, and how to demonstrate understanding of key details in a text.

If you use the read-aloud version of Idabelle’s story (included in the PDF below), be sure to display the images below to aid students’ understanding of the text.