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Pixton for Social Studies: Where Students Step into the Stories of Our World

Pixton immerses students in the people, places, and events they’re studying and moves them beyond memorizing facts to truly understanding the past by strengthening their critical thinking, analysis, and writing skills.

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Bring Social Studies and History to Life with Pixton

Captivate your students across U.S. history, world history, civics, government, geography and more with hands-on activities designed to make learning engaging and motivating. 

Pixton builds key critical thinking skills by combining interactive visual learning with purposeful reading and writing practice. Students learn to analyze cause and effect, evaluate historical perspectives, and explain chronology, skills that help them retain and apply what they learn. 

What’s Inside Pixton’s Interactive Social Studies Lessons

Pixton’s Comic Maker has all the tools and resources you need for effective Social Studies instruction:

Social Studies Lesson Ideas

Social Studies Lesson Ideas

Design your lessons with ease using Pixton’s ready-to-go Lesson Ideas. Choose your learning objective to explore hundreds of social studies, history, and civics-aligned lessons designed to engage and motivate your students.
Story Starters

Featured Content and Story Starters

Pixton’s Featured Content includes backgrounds, characters, facial expressions, and more that are aligned to historical events, places, and eras. Each content pack helps students bring their understanding to life through creative storytelling. 


Not sure where to begin? Use Pixton’s Story Starters to have students explain a significant moment in history, retell an event from their own point of view, or analyze different historical perspectives.

Social Studies Activity Maker

AI-Assisted Activity Maker

With Pixton’s AI-Assisted Activity Maker, you can generate custom Social Studies activities in seconds. Simply type in the topic, skill, or idea you want students to learn and the Activity Maker will help you design a lesson that meets your goals.
Interactive Rubric

Interactive Rubric

Pixton’s Comic Maker includes an interactive rubric that allows students to assess themselves before you do, opening the doors to deeper conversation and personalized learning.
Assessments

Assessments

Diagnostic - See what your students know before you begin.

Use Pixton at the start of a unit to gauge reading comprehension, check for historical understanding, and assess knowledge of key vocabulary or social studies concepts. Asking students to build or complete a short comic that illustrates their understanding of a topic - or analyze an event from another point of view - gives you a clear picture of where each student is starting.

Formative - Make checks for understanding more engaging and student-friendly. 

Pixton makes it easy to monitor understanding during your Social Studies lessons. Students can quickly create or revise a comic to retell an event, explain a historical figure’s motivations, or show how they would apply new vocabulary and concepts. These short, low-stakes creations help you see how students are processing new material in real time, so you can adjust instruction with confidence.

Summative - Students show their learning through creative storytelling.

At the end of a unit, students can use Pixton to produce a complete comic that shows their learning beyond traditional tests. They might reconstruct an event, explain its causes and effects, or explore the viewpoints of people who lived it. Their finished work gives you a deeper look at their understanding and reasoning.

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Why You’ll Love Teaching Social Studies with Pixton

  • student group

    Real Engagement, Real Learning

    Pixton turns all students, even reluctant readers, into enthusiastic creators. The Comic Maker motivates students, increases class participation, and makes Social Studies assignments exciting instead of intimidating.
  • teacher desk with papers and books

    Built to Fit Your Social Studies Curriculum

    Pixton fits seamlessly into your school’s curriculum. Activities align with national and state requirements and popular social studies curricula, and the AI-assisted Activity Maker helps you generate standards-based lessons in minutes.
  • Social Studies teacher and class

    Designed to Make Your Day Easier

    With hundreds of social studies content packs, lesson ideas, story starters, and other resources, you’ll have high-quality materials at your fingertips – no extra prep time required.
Pixton adapts to a wide range of student interests and abilities, gives every learner a way to represent themselves, and fosters more personal connections to learning.

Why Pixton works

ESSA Badge SML
Digital Promise Badge

Pixton’s Comic Maker has been evaluated in several studies and meets ESSA Level 2 evidence standards as an effective instructional resource.

Read the ESSA study

Testimonials

  • Nicole

    Washington, United States

    It's a different and unique way to engage students in creative thinking. I love using it in my history classes to tell the story of the past.
  • Emily

    Ontario, Canada

    This is such an engaging website and it is intuitive to navigate. I've used it to have students retell stories, to demonstrate their understanding of science and social studies topics, and as a Language activity for early finishers and I think it is well worth it.
  • Emily

    New York, United States

    I teach ENL and this is a resource that doesn't require much language proficiency. Students can show their understanding using this app. I use it in ELA and Social Studies classes. I love Pixton!!
  • Jennifer

    Ontario, Canada

    My students love Pixton, and I use it for integrating media across other subjects, such as Science, Social Studies, Visual Arts and Language.
  • Kerry

    Illinois, United States

    So many creative ways to use this program. Just used it for a social studies culminating project. My students created two graphic novel pages about ways to be more sustainable at home, school and in our community.

 

Ready to Bring Pixton's Creative Power to Your Social Studies Classroom?