8 Reasons Parents Love CommonLit
Learn why parents around the country are turning to CommonLit’s free literacy program
Finding the right high-quality learning programs to use with your children at home isn’t easy. With so many different types of resources out there, it can be hard to know where to start. To make the decision process a bit easier, we’ve compiled the top 8 reasons why CommonLit is the ideal literacy program for you to use with your children.
Reason 1: CommonLit Has Great Reading Passages from Real Authors
The Library of Congress recognized CommonLit in 2017 with the Best Practices in Literacy Award. This is due in large part to CommonLit’s extensive digital library of over 1,500 English reading passages and over 500 Spanish reading passages. Our library includes engaging short stories, poems, informational articles, and other texts that are free for teachers, parents, and students. It features reading passages by J.K. Rowling, Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Martin Luther King Jr., Gary Soto, Malcolm Gladwell, Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez, and many other well-known contemporary authors. When you use CommonLit, you know that your children are reading texts that are thought-provoking, culturally relevant, and meaningful.
Reason 2: CommonLit’s Reading Passages Come with High-Quality Learning Tools
Each CommonLit reading lesson includes:
- Carefully-chosen videos to help build engagement
- Paired passages to help students build background knowledge and extend learning
- Comprehension questions that make it easy to track progress
- Discussion questions to build student engagement
Reason 3: CommonLit Actually Works for Kids
The more CommonLit assignments students complete, the more gains they experience on CommonLit’s reading assignments.
CommonLit continuously works with a third-party evaluator, AdHoc Analytics, to measure the effectiveness of our reading program. These researchers found that when students completed over 20 lessons on CommonLit, they saw scores increase by an average of 13 percentage points. Increased CommonLit usage is also associated with more students reaching proficient or mastery level on a state assessment. So, when you use CommonLit with your children, you can be confident that it’s a reading program that will actually drive reading growth.
Reason 4: CommonLit Supports All Learners
It’s important to know that CommonLit can support all learners. CommonLit’s lessons are challenging, but parents can also use Guided Reading Mode to bridge the gap for struggling readers. When Guided Reading Mode is enabled, it automatically “chunks” the text into smaller pieces so children can’t move on until they’ve correctly answered a comprehension question. This is a great method for increasing student independence and metacognition skills.
If your children need additional scaffolding while reading, our lessons include text-to-speech, translation in 25+ languages, and a digital annotation tool that students can learn how to use in seconds. Digital annotations allow students to highlight any part of the text and add an annotation that parents can view from their account.
Reason 5: CommonLit is Perfect for Digital and Paper-Based Instruction
CommonLit’s lessons exist in both a printable and digital format. As a parent, you have complete flexibility to assign lessons to your child digitally or print them out for your child to complete on paper as you see fit.
Reason 6: CommonLit is Great for Long-Term Planning
If you’re looking to assign a series of lessons to your children, CommonLit provides easy-to-use text sets that cover a range of literary movements, historical periods, and STEM topics. These text sets come with a range of literary and nonfiction lessons that span many grade levels, and they are great for kids who want to dive deeply into an area of interest. Each text set has a short introduction to the topic and you can choose the reading passages that are the best fit for your children.
Reason 7: CommonLit now has Spanish-language Reading Passages
CommonLit debuted its Spanish-language library in 2018. This fast-growing library includes over 500 reading passages. These lessons include many of CommonLit’s most popular tools and lesson features such as related media, discussion questions, and digital annotations.
Reason 8: CommonLit is Completely Free for Teachers and Parents
That’s right, CommonLit’s literacy program is completely free for teachers, parents, and students. The CommonLit team is made up of former educators who care deeply about supporting meaningful instruction in classrooms and at home.
If you ever have any questions while using CommonLit, reach out to help@commonlit.org and the CommonLit Support Team will point you in the right direction.
Ready to start using CommonLit with your children? If so, check out this blog post to learn how to create your free CommonLit account.
We are excited to support your home instruction!
