Read Across America celebrations are a fun way to excite your learners about books and reading. Students can use Wixie’s tools to combine text, images, voice narration, and video to create their own response to a story or nonfiction book your class is reading. From pre-made templates to more complex literature adaptions, here are a few ideas your classroom can create with Wixie and Read Across America!
Pre-made Wixie templates
Students can always begin creating projects in Wixie from a blank page. Wixie's teacher dashboard gives you access to thousands of standards-based curriculum templates you can assign to students as well.
You can find several easy-to-implement activities for Read Across America Day by:
- logging in to your Wixie account,
- selecting the Curriculum library,
- opening the Month-by-Month folder, and
- browsing the templates in the March folder.
You can find even more templates and activities by typing words like character, story, book, read, and review into the Search field.
Retell the stories you are reading to celebrate
In Kindergarten and grade 1, the Common Core Standards for Reading: Literature include retelling and identifying major events (K.2, K.3, 1.2, 1.3) and in grade 2, they expand to include describing the structure of a story (2.5).
After reading a story, such as Mary Wore Her Red Dress by Merle Peek, to your class, ask students to retell the story in Wixie. For example, students can retell in:
- Kindergarten by painting a picture and recording a sentence.
- First-grade with pictures and text in a Character-Setting-Events organizer.
- Second grade by drawing and typing to show events in sequence.
Wixie's Library includes clip art images for many common picture books. You can connect these to your templates so that students can simply click and drag to a page to share key details or sequence events in the story.
Read Across America bookmarks
As you work to celebrate Read Across America day, ask your students to help by creating bookmarks that spread the joy of reading. Wixie makes the process easy with a bookmark template students can open on their own.
Creating bookmarks is a great way to get your students thinking about what makes reading enjoyable themselves.
Extend a pattern story
There's a Wocket in My Pocket by Dr. Seuss combines rhyme and nonsense words, providing a fun opportunity to build phonics skills with your students. Challenge your students to build phonics skills by writing this way as you create your class's version of the story!
Ask each student to choose a location in a house (or even your classroom) and create a name for an imaginary creature that rhymes with this location. Have each student use Wixie to write and illustrate their page and combine their individual Wixie pages together for a class book.
If you love this idea, but read literature other than Dr. Seuss for Read Across America, explore these other great pattern stories that make for great student adaptations.
Adapt a phonics story
Make phonics fun for your emerging readers and writers by showing them how effective authors play with language to make their writing interesting. Read Dr. Seuss's Fox in Socks, and put your students in the driver's seat by asking them to use their knowledge of phonics to write their own tongue twister stories.
Here's to a great Read Across America celebration!
