Archive

Celebrate Women with These 10 Reading Passages

Women trailblazers, authors, poets, and characters that will inspire your classroom In fifth grade, I dressed up as Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean,...

Using CommonLit's Benchmark Assessments to Ensure Student Growth

A Q&A with a District Curriculum Supervisor Jayne VanNosdall is the Curriculum Supervisor of English (6–12) for Brick Township Public Schools in New Jersey. For this Q&...

Six Simple Ways to Get Your Students Talking

In this post, history teacher Lucas Richardson shares strategies to increase student talk time. Does anyone remember Ben Stein’s part as the boring economics teacher in Ferris Bueller’s...

10 Reading Passages Celebrating African Americans

Diverse poetry, short stories and informational texts African Americans are an integral part of our nation’s history and literary traditions. It always surprised me when high school students in...

The Instructional Design Behind CommonLit's Viral Reading Program

6 of the best practices that inform our tools & resources The phrase “best practices” gets thrown around a lot in education, particularly when it comes to teaching literacy. So...

How One School Invigorated Their Reading Program with CommonLit

A Q&A with a Reading Coach/English Teacher Update January 19, 2019: In this Q&A from January 2018, “CommonLit for Leaders” is referenced several times. That...

An Administrator's Advice for Rolling Out CommonLit in your District

A Q&A with a District English Curriculum Specialist Roxanne Friday is the English Curriculum Specialist for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. Roxanne has worked closely with the CommonLit team to...

5 Reasons Teachers Love CommonLit

Why teachers everywhere are using the edtech literacy tool With tears in her eyes, a teacher I had just met hugged me after I introduced her to CommonLit at a...

Everything You Need to Present CommonLit

Impress everyone with this Ready-to-go Presentation on CommonLit Do you love CommonLit and have plans to share it with fellow educators? If so, you’re in luck! We’...

CommonLit's Reports Turn Data into Action

Dive deeper with student performance data Looking to more closely analyze students’ strengths and weaknesses? We’ve added new features to the Student Performance page to help you improve instruction....

Teach Young Readers Metacognition Skills

In this guest teacher post, Debra Rook describes how to help students chunk complex texts as they read. No More One and Done On our first official day of class,...

Help Your Students ACE Reading Assessments

In this guest teacher post, Tammy Anfang describes a writing framework to improve student learning. Making the Invisible Process of Reading and Responding Visible About ten years ago when I...

10 Texts to Integrate STEM and Literacy

Encouraging science literacy in all classes I’ll admit that while I was a strong student in most areas, I had a very uneven interest in my subjects; I was...

4 Creative Ways to Use Nonfiction Text Sets

Learn how to engage your students with nonfiction Text sets are groups of reading passages that share a common topic. Currently, we have over 60 of these sets of texts...

The Hidden Power Of A Nonprofit Business Model

“In a nonprofit model, you have the freedom to focus on pure impact with no caveats.” This post was originally published in Forbes [https://www.forbes.com/sites/fastforward/2017/...

Unit Plans for Targeted Literacy Instruction

Everything you need to get started with CommonLit’s Units When I taught 7th Grade English, I spent hours looking for the perfect texts to weave into my units. I...

Meaningful Discussions with Nonfiction Texts

In this guest teacher post, Sarah Cooper describes how to motivate students to take ownership of their learning. Participation has always been one of the most difficult things to assess...

Action! 5 Ways Videos Can Energize Your Lessons

How to use videos before, during, and after readings When I first started teaching, I worked really hard to create lessons that taught students a clear skill. However, I quickly...

16 Lesson Ideas for CommonLit Texts

In this post, teacher Leah Dekle shares ideas for using CommonLit texts. When I started teaching, I felt pretty isolated because I was the only 9th grade social studies teacher...

Albertia’s Story

Getting Struggling Readers on Grade Level For the past 10 years, Albertia has been enthusiastically helping some of the most at-risk students in North Carolina. She teaches at a...

10 Exciting Texts on CommonLit

Famous stories, poems, and articles your students will love One of the most important but time-consuming tasks for teachers is finding engaging reading passages for students. CommonLit saves teachers...

LaVelda’s Story

Asking Real Questions to Get Real Answers When most teachers are enjoying a summer break, LaVelda is hard at work teaching her summer school students. She is unfazed by the...

Tabatha’s Story

Engaging Advanced Readers with CommonLit Tabatha’s decision to become a teacher can be traced back to her experiences as an undergraduate in New York. She was living there during...

Roster Management Tools for Easy Organization

Welcome Back Series: Part I -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Happy August, teachers! We hope you were relaxing and recharging for the next school year. Here at CommonLit [http://www.commonlit.org], summer is a...

New and Improved Assignment Reports

Welcome Back Series: Part II -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By now, you may have already read about updates to our class roster systems on CommonLit [http://www.commonlit.org]. If not, check out that...