How do I find texts?

CommonLit's greatest asset is its library of texts. With thousands of short stories, news articles, poems, primary source documents, short plays, fiction excerpts, and nonfiction pieces for grades 3-12, there's something for every student! CommonLit's library will help you plan for new, exciting units and expand your curriculum with quality resources. 

There are many ways to browse CommonLit's library. If you're just getting started, we recommend checking out the featured content in our library.

If you want to find content that meets a particular need, you can use the filters on the library page, or in the navigation menu at the top of the website to search and filter our texts. You have several options for how to browse: by content type (texts, book pairings, text sets, units, and themes), by thematic connections, by related book title, by text set topic, by grade level and Lexile level, by literary device, by genre, or by standard. You can also search for a specific title, author, book, or topic using the search bar.

Let's say you are trying to find the perfect text for your 9th grade short story unit on morality.

There are a few ways to do this. You can Browse All Content and use the filters in the library to search "9th grade" under grade level, "morality" under themes, and "short story" under genre, and come up with 9 hits.

Or you can combine search terms and the filters by searching "morality" in the search bar and filtering by "9th grade" and "short story." This method is especially useful when you don't know what topics are covered by CommonLit's text sets and themes.

Finally, you can just search "morality" and see what content types come up. The first hit shows a morality theme, and when I click on the theme, I can view all texts tagged with this theme grouped by grade level.

Looking for a text that we don't seem to have? Feel free to contact us to make a recommendation!