Build Early Literacy Skills with Pixie

A combination of Pixie Activities and open-ended projects helps students build early literacy skills, such as vocabulary and comprehension. Pixie Activities can help you assess student understanding of basic literacy skills like initial sounds. Students can also using the paint tools and stickers to illustrate text they are reading and record their voices to retell stories. How you choose to have students use Pixie will depend on your immediate literacy goals.

You can have students complete Activities to assess their phonemic awareness skills. Activities like Initial Sounds, ABC Word Order, and Vowel Sounds require students to identify initial sounds in a word or categorize them by initial or medial sounds. Using a more open-ended approach, students could use stickers and paint tools to create an alphabet book showing words that have this initial sound.

Students can demonstrate their understanding and ability to produce rhyming words and alliteration by creating their own illustrated poems or limericks. Julie McCoy and Jan Tell of Grand Island, Nebraska, had students write an alliterative sentence for each letter of the alphabet, use paint tools illustrate it, and then combined the pages into an animated class movie.

To help students practice using their phonemic awareness to help them identify words, have them complete simple activities such as Match Case. Activities like this build basic letter and sound identification skills and help educators assess a student’s understanding of Alphabetic Principle. Other activities, such as Make New Words, help students blend sounds and syllables to form words.

Students can record their voices to build fluency skills. To practice speed and accuracy, have students record instructions on an Activity they are completing. Then, when they need help, they can click Play to hear the directions read back to them. If they have been writing original stories or retelling nursery rhymes or fairy tales, recording their voices helps students practice their expression.

Activities like Synonyms, Antonyms, Prefixes, and Suffixes help students build vocabulary skills. Alphabet and ABC-style books are great ways to build vocabulary on a particular topic, such as animals or transportation. Cloze Activities can help students learn to use word context clues and sentence structure to develop understanding of new words. Students can also provide visual clues to the meaning of new vocabulary words with the Cool Word feature.

Students can demonstrate comprehension as they draw pictures to visualize what they have read. For example, students completing the New Book Cover Activity visually summarize the content of a story. They can also create illustrated plot summaries to encourage other students to read a new book title or genre.

Students can respond to the text they have read by drawing and writing their own dramatizations or new versions of the story. Students in Miss Alia’s class at Woodward Academy created their own version of Judi Barrett’s Things that are MOST in the World. They brainstormed superlatives, chose their favorites, wrote a sentence that provided context clues to the meaning of the word, illustrated the sentence, and created an online storybook.

Students can also make personal connections to the characters and events in texts by placing themselves as the main character in a story and reinterpreting events.

You can find more early literacy activities and lesson ideas at the Trading Post.

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