Olaudah Equiano's "The Interesting Life" Memoir Unit

This teaching pack guides an in-depth study of an excerpt from Equiano's memoir The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano detailing his journey on the Middle Passage. There are so many options with this low prep pack that you can pick and choose or work your way through them all.

Student Experience: Students are guided through the background, key events of the period, vocabulary words, an opportunity for summarizing, guided discussion for breaking down the memoir, interactive analysis of the memoir itself, optional group activity, paired poetry lesson, paired modern memoir analysis, and a follow-up independent personal narrative/memoir writing assignment. Students explore the provided memoir exemplars to write their own as the culminating task.

Included in this teaching bundle:

1) Background notes on Equiano and The Middle Passage

2) Background notes on Tony Dungy for the paired modern memoir excerpt from his life and football memoir Quiet Strength

3) Guided lesson for both texts with standards

4) Paired Poetry Lesson Langston Hughes's "Refugee in America"

5) Comprehension and analysis questions and answers for all three texts

6) Follow up personal narrative/memoir writing prompt.

7) Links to all texts

-- PDF file for worksheets and PPT file for presentations, Main pages converted to Google format

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Terms of Use: Created by Julie Faulkner, updated 2023

Please, one classroom use only. Additional licenses are sold at checkout. This license is nontransferable. Not eligible for online environments unless password protected. Posting openly online is prohibited. No part of this resource can be used for commercial purposes, altered, or resold. This work is my original work, and taking portions of it to create something else for resale is prohibited.