Literacy

CommonLit Releases New Features that Offer Lessons on Literacy, Reading and History

• By Richard Chang
• 01/19/17

CommonLit, a nonprofit that offers free, online instructional materials and tracking tools to support literacy development for students in grades 5 to 12, has released new features that further support its mission.

Text sets cover a range of historical, cultural and political topics and include relevant reading passages from a variety of genres. Topics include “Modern Democracy in America,” “Native American History,” “The American Revolution,” “Immigration” and “The Civil Rights Movement.”

Each text set contains 5-20 individual lesson resources that share a common topic or historical period. Like all of CommonLit’s materials, the texts themselves can be assigned to classes or to individual students through the platform. Students can answer a set of text-dependent questions online, and teachers can access data analytics on student progress. Each text also comes with a discussion guide, recommended paired passages, related media and a parent guide. Schools with limited technology can download a printable version of the resources.

Another new feature from CommonLit is the Guided Reading Mode, designed specifically to help struggling readers make meaning out of difficult text. The video below explains more about this new feature.

The Guided Reading Mode includes “scaffolded” guiding questions, assessments and a discussion option.

Last year, the United States Department of Education awarded CommonLit $3.9 million as part of its Innovative Approaches to Literacy program.

To learn more about the organization, visit commonlit.org.