As a reminder, this Student Exemplar blog is used as a way for Mr. S’mores to provide examples of blog assignments to students. For this assignment, students are to read a specific text, using CommonLit.org for the first time, and reflect on the learning experience. In this post, though, I’m reflecting on a different text at CommonLit in order to show model the style of such a response, but avoiding doing the specific analysis work my students are responsible for conducting.

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I enjoy reading, but sometimes it takes me several times reading through a text to begin to understand what it is saying. This can be frustrating, but there are some things that help me improve.

Today I used the CommonLit website for the first time. My teacher assigned my class to read “How Jackie Robinson Played Baseball,” by Jessica McBirney. He told us he selected questions based on specific standards for us to answer. He said that the standards on identifying and analyzing key ideas and details are the same standards we will be tested on when we take our next CFA (i.e., Common Formative Assessment).

I like the text we read. I love sports, and Jackie Robinson’s one of the greatest baseball players of all time. I learned several things I didn’t know and some I’d forgotten:

• He was arrested and jailed for disputing a black friend’s arrest.
• He joined the military, but never was called to action in battle.
• He was removed from a bus by military police when he refused to sit in the back of a segregated bus.
• He started in the Negro baseball leagues, but eventually grabbed the attention of the Brooklyn Dodgers and was drafted.
• He helped the Dodgers win a National League pennant, and in 1956, he led them to being World Series champions.

The questions at CommonLit made me look closely at the text. One question asked me about the central idea of the text. I had to read four options and decide which one was the best response. I also had to select a detail from the text that best supported the central idea. There were also a couple questions that required me to give longer responses about why Robinson is an American hero and how American culture has changed over the last 60 years.

CommonLit allows me to type responses directly onto the page. This is different from Blackboard. It also makes it easy to listen to an audio version of the text.