Archive

8 Inspiring Biographies Featuring Influential Black Americans for Secondary Students

These engaging and diverse biographies on CommonLit’s digital literary platform will inspire your students to dream big and achieve excellence while strengthening their reading comprehension skills. CommonLit’s online...

CommonLit and Quill.org Team Up to Launch AIWritingCheck.org Site to Help Teachers Identify AI-Generated Writing

Quill.org and CommonLit.org launched AIWritingCheck.org, a free tool that allows educators to determine whether a text passage was created by humans or AI. Education technology nonprofits Quill....

CommonLit 360 Drives Academic Improvement in NYC Schools

A study of CommonLit 360 across 11 middle schools shows strong growth in reading achievement among kids utilizing the curriculum. CommonLit 360 is CommonLit’s high-quality, engaging, and full-...

Powerful Poems by Black Authors for Secondary Students

These engaging and diverse poems on CommonLit’s digital literary platform are all written by Black authors and poets. Each poem will spark reading engagement from secondary students with powerful...

8 Influential and Famous Black Authors with Lessons on CommonLit

CommonLit’s online digital literacy program is full of authentic texts by famous authors and poets. The following texts are a great resource for building meaningful and rigorous lessons for...

10 Texts to Celebrate The Life and Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Honor the achievements of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in your classroom with historical biographies, primary source documents, speeches, and more. CommonLit’s online digital literacy program provides teachers with...

15+ Tips to Make CommonLit 360 Units Come Alive for Your Students

Engage students with these incredible teaching strategies that will get them moving, talking, and learning CommonLit 360 is a rigorous and grade-level aligned curriculum that has been shown to...

How to Teach a CommonLit 360 Research Unit

Engage students with interesting research topics, teach them skills to become adept independent researchers, and help them craft their end-of-unit research papers. CommonLit 360 is a comprehensive ELA...

2022 Year In Review

This year CommonLit published impactful research, added hundreds of new library lessons, introduced Target Lessons, launched new 360 units, and more. 2022 was an exciting year for CommonLit. We introduced...

Standards-Based Data Dashboards Make Analyzing Student Growth Even Easier with CommonLit!

At CommonLit, we’re dedicated to helping all students grow as readers while simultaneously making teacher’s lives easier. That’s why we’ve updated our standards-based performance charts...

New Library Feature: Teacher Overviews

As a teacher, finding the right text is time consuming. Reading text after text in its entirety to figure out if it fits the unit or highlights the right teaching...

Support Elementary Students with Analyzing Character Change: 5 Skills-Based Comprehension Lessons from CommonLit’s Digital Literacy Program

Tracing how characters change over the course of a text is a critical skill of every great reader. As students age, the texts and characters they encounter become increasingly complex,...

Explore 7 Engaging Secondary Texts by Famous Authors

Looking for compelling new lessons to add to your ELA curriculum? CommonLit’s digital library has hundreds of short stories by famous authors. Our guiding questions will help prepare students...

9 Elementary Texts to Light Up the Holiday Season

Looking to bring the holiday spirit to your elementary classroom? Jump into these festive winter texts about the holidays traditions from around the world. Winter is a season of plenty...

6 Elementary Texts to Ring In New Years Around The World

As the New Year approaches, bring multicultural learning to your classroom with these stories about New Year’s celebrations across different countries, cultures, and faiths. Holiday celebrations are a great...

7 Famous Poems by Shel Silverstein

CommonLit’s digital library includes texts by hundreds of well-known and award-winning authors and poets. Shel Silverstein is one of the most commonly-read children’s poets, known...

Everything You Need to Know About CommonLit’s Ambassador Program

Network with other teachers, learn from our team, receive swag, and spread the word about 360 as a CommonLit Ambassador! We are excited to announce the inaugural CommonLit 360 Ambassador...

Advocate for the Use of CommonLit’s Full Instructional Program in Your School or District

Our easy-to-use presentation will help you make your case to administrators and key stakeholders about why CommonLit is the best choice for your team Do you love using...

All the Ways CommonLit Supports English Language Learners

CommonLit’s free digital literacy program helps support English language Learners with digital accessibility tools, scaffolded reading comprehension, explicit vocabulary instruction, and more. CommonLit’s free online digital literacy program...

7 Texts Teachers Love to Pair With Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson

Teach key background knowledge and incorporate multi-genre analysis in a unit on Jacob Have I Loved [https://www.commonlit.org/en/book-pairings/jacob-have-i-loved] by Katherine...

6 Famous Acceptance Speeches to Celebrate Nobel Prize Day with Your Secondary Students

Each year on December 10th, The Norwegian Nobel Committee awards the Nobel Peace Prize to a person or organization for their significant contributions to improving society. At the award ceremony,...

Informational Texts to Help Students Build Background Knowledge Around Current Events (And Support Reading Comprehension Skills!)

Student curiosity can lead them to explore all kinds of things - even current events! That’s why we created a round-up of current event articles from our digital literacy...

Cozy Up to a Good Poem: Winter-Themed Poems for Elementary Students

6 Winter-Themed Poems to Engage Elementary Students Colder weather doesn’t have to mean frozen content! These engaging and diverse poems about winter  on CommonLit’s free digital literacy...

7 Reading Comprehension Lessons to Teach Students How to Find The Main Idea of a Nonfiction Text

These easy-to-use main idea lessons will engage students with high-interest topics while helping them hone important grade-level reading comprehension skills. Target Lessons are highly engaging lessons...

7 Brand-New Elementary Target Lessons To Help Students’ Reading Comprehension

Engage students while they learn critical reading comprehension skills, including finding the main idea, analyzing character change, finding the meaning of unknown words and more. Target Lessons are easy-to-...