TeachKind Rescue Stories: Florence the Cat Survives a Flood

Stories of people helping 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!

This rescue story is about Florence, a cat named after the 2018 hurricane that left her stranded on a flooded porch. Natural disasters affect us all, so use her story to discuss with students the importance of including their animal companions in their family’s emergency plans and the reasons why they should never leave them behind in the case of an evacuation.

Use other TeachKind resources to create an entire lesson around this story. You can use this worksheet to address the following Common Core English language arts standards:

KINDERGARTEN

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

GRADE 1

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

GRADE 2

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.