Throughout this unit on Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, students practice the same six skills with greater scaffolding and modeling at the beginning, and more independence toward the middle and end. The tasks include: 1. writing to an essential question to access background knowledge; 2. using context clues and root words to determine word meaning; 3. close reading with the aid of a glossary; 4. taking notes one of two graphic organizers (sequence of events and/or empathy map); 5. re-reading to answer text dependent questions; and 6. summarizing the chapter.

In this lesson students will use the core standards and an academic vocabulary template (adapted from Janet Allen and Robert Marzano) to explicitly learn the academic language they will need to understand, not only in English Language Arts, but in all content areas.

The following presentation was used during an in-service session with secondary educators. It provides information on how to explicitly teach vocabulary to students across the content areas. This presentation also provides information on how to use vocabulary log notebooks with students.