CommonLit

Repository of free English texts, organized by theme

Overview

CommonLit offers teachers a free online collection of Common Core aligned reading materials. Teachers can use CommonLit to find texts for students from 4th to 12th grade. All content is available for free online.

GOALS

CommonLit, a non-profit organization, offers teachers a free online collection of Common Core aligned reading materials. CommonLit hopes to help struggling students develop college ready reading skills.

APPROACH

Once on the CommonLit website, teachers are prompted to first choose a theme such as “America or “identity” to narrow down their choices. Next, teachers can select a discussion question related to their chosen theme and then to specify a reading grade level, ranging from 4th to 12th grade. At this point, CommonLit provides teachers with poems, news articles, short stories and more, all of which can be directly downloaded from their website without signing up. In addition to the text itself, each downloaded document comes with discussion questions and follow up reading suggestions.

CommonLit’s reading collection consists of reading materials that teachers have marked as particularly loved and discussed by students. After teachers identify texts of this type, CommonLit works to obtain the necessary copyrights and then offers the texts for free.

IMPLEMENTATION

CommonLit is built for any web-browser on both mobile and desktop.

PRICING

All of CommonLit’s reading materials are available for free.

WHO IS USING IT

Launched in 2014, CommonLit has over 1000 teachers using its reading materials.