Effective Literacy Website #2- CommonLit

IRA Newsletter Weekly Project: Effective Literacy Website #2

 

CommonLit

CommonLit (https://www.commonlit.org/) is a free literacy resource that is designed by a team of expert educators for teachers and students from grades 3-12. The welcome page describes the website as, “A reading program that reaches all students.”  The website provides teachers with research-based instructional materials that are aligned to the Common Core State Standards. The resources, which includes a free digital library, are designed to help students develop advanced reading and writing skills and help support struggling readers and English Language Learners. This website offers a variety of tools to help support struggling readers. Some of these tools include: a Guided Reading Mode, which breaks reading into chunks and provides students with feedback on their understanding, Read Aloud, which provides auditory engagement, and Translation and Annotations, tools used for vocabulary and with English Language Learners.

The welcome page presents visitors with links that will take them through the website to explore all that CommonLit offers. There are links to products, such as the free library (https://www.commonlit.org/en/library )  and to  formative insights and professional development for administrators (https://www.commonlit.org/en/school-essentials) to enroll their school or district into the program.

What I found most interesting about CommonLit is that its free digital lesson library contains lessons and materials from authors such as J.K. Rowling and Martin Luther King Jr., that are relevant and will keep students engaged. Users are able to filter through the books by content type, grade level, Lexile Range, genre, themes, literary devices, standards, and even languages.

            CommonLit is an effective literacy website as it is a research-based program. It offers a variety of resources developed to improve and support literacy skills in students from the elementary level to the high school level, at no cost to its users. CommonLit is designed to be simple, easy to navigate, and is integrated with Google Classroom.