With a focus on literacy, this multi-day lesson uses geography and historical reading to help students learn about the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and the ongoing territorial disputes that led to the 2023 genocide of Armenians in Artsakh. This piece is a great segway into a longer study of the Armenian Genocide, WWI, or Armenian Genocide memoir or historical fiction.

During World War I, the Turkish leadership of the Ottoman Empire implemented a policy of annihilation against their minority Christian population; during this genocide, approximately 1.5 million Armenians—half the Armenian population living in their indigenous 3,000-year homeland—were murdered through deprivation, exposure, and torture. Their communal and personal properties were stolen, and the few survivors were forced to flee to other countries.