Effective Literacy Website #1: CommonLit by Atisa Junio

    CommonLit is a free to use website that hosts articles, poems, short stories, and lessons aligned to Common Core Reading standards. When first going onto CommonLit, you have the option to login or sign-up. Sign up gives you the option to create a student or educator account. If students are signing up, they can do so with a class code. Educator sign-up will take you through several questions such as your role, you school, name, email, and password creation. If you are logging in, you can login using your Gmail, Clever, ClassLink, or CommonLit account. The educator home page is basically your dashboard where you can view or create classes, access the CommonLit Library and curate your own library of articles and assignments, and see PDs organized through/with the CommonLit site. When creating your classrooms, you can manually input students with a generated class code or you can import them from Google Classrooms.

    When clicking on the “Browse Content” and/or “Library,” you will see the following (see above image). You can browse by texts, target lessons (pre-built lessons for skills you want your students to focus on), collections, and supplemental units. Scrolling down, you will see other quick-view categories like the newest texts and the most popular texts on CommonLit (see image below).

 To filter your results for articles or assignments further, there are options to filter by grade level, genre, standards (with a focus on Reading Common Core standards), content type, Lexile range, literary devices, themes, and languages (see image below). To further explore some of the tools and features available, let’s look at one target lesson from CommonLit, “Finding the Meaning of Unknown Words with “The Star Beast”.”

    As seen in the image above, the lesson starts out with a lesson overview, outlining the parts of the lesson. Even in this first part of the lesson, the text size can be adjusted for readers, read aloud is available for the instructions, as well as translations of the text to 41 different languages.

    Moving onto Part 2 of the lesson, there are anticipatory videos to help introduce the skill being covered as well as a quick write activity to keep students engaged and working (see image above). Part 3 is another reminder and example of the skill being targeted in the lesson (see image below).

            Part 4 is the actual reading, with questions interspersed through the text that must be answered to move onto the next chunk of reading (see image below). This section also has translation options and the read aloud function available.

            Part 5 has more questions to assess and wrap up the lesson (see image below).

            Finally, Part 6 is student feedback for the educator to review and gauge student progress after the lesson (see image below).

For an additional look into what CommonLit has to offer, the following will be a look into a randomly selected article. Looking at the image below, you can see that when selecting an article as an educator, options for related text and media are provided with answer keys for the questions included in the article. This can be helpful in creating and planning units and making reading suggestions to students whose interests have been sparked.

As a final note on CommonLit, I was under the impression that CommonLit leveled their texts for readers at different Lexile levels. However, upon looking at the site’s FAQs, the following answer was found (see image below):

CommonLit challenges students to reach upward when reading and encourages them to use the tools available to continue improving. In conclusion, CommonLit is a website effective in promoting literacy as it aids educators, parents, and students in reading and comprehending texts from a variety of subject areas and with a variety of supports.