TeachKind Rescue Stories: ‘Dillan’s New Life’

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 Dillan, an elderly bear who was confined to a tiny, barren enclosure for 10 long years at the Union County Sportsmen’s Club in Pennsylvania. His lack of space and a poor diet led to obesity and painful dental disease that went untreated despite multiple citations. Fortunately, kind people pushed for his rescue and Dillan was taken to The Wild Animal Sanctuary in Colorado, where he thrived in a naturalistic habitat.

You can use other TeachKind resources to create an entire lesson around this story, and this worksheet is ideal for addressing the following Common Core English language arts standards:

GRADE 3
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.3.1
Ask and answer questions to demonstrate understanding of a text, referring explicitly to the text as the basis for the answers.

GRADE 4
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.4.1
Refer to details and examples in a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.

GRADE 5
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.5.1
Quote accurately from a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.

Be sure to watch Dillan’s rescue video to see his transition to a new life:

Download Dillan’s rescue story reading comprehension worksheet!

Download this lesson in digital format here.

(Note to teachers: The digital format does not include the answer sheet. To view the answer sheet for grading purposes, please download the PDF version.)

Want more Rescue Stories reading comprehension worksheets? Download our bundle for grades 3–5 on TPT, and follow our store for more empathy-building academic content.