How to teach the countries of West Asia and the Middle East

Grade 3 to Grade 6

West Asia, often called the Middle East, is a cluster of around eighteen countries that gets squashed on a whole-Asia map, so it needs its own closer map. Split it into two chunks, Turkey with the Caucasus and the Levant in the north, and Iraq, Iran and the Arabian Peninsula in the south, and learn one chunk at a time on a blank map rather than treating every country as a separate fact.

How to teach it

1. Start with the big anchors, Turkey across the top, Iran on the east and Saudi Arabia filling the Arabian Peninsula, then fit the smaller countries around them.
2. Learn one half at a time on a blank map: point, name, then write, and only add the second half once the first is secure.
3. Use the seas and gulfs as anchors: the Mediterranean on the west, the Red Sea down the left of Arabia, the Persian Gulf between Arabia and Iran with the small Gulf states along its shore.
4. Group the crowded northern countries, the three Caucasus states (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan) and the Levant strip (Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan), and learn them as sets rather than one by one.
5. Handle the edges honestly: the tiny states of Cyprus, Bahrain and Palestine are too small to label on this map and are just named, and Turkey sits in both Europe and Asia.

Common mistakes

• Muddling the small, crowded Levant countries (Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan) with each other.
• Confusing the three Caucasus states, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, or their order.
• Mixing up the small Gulf states (Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates) strung along the Persian Gulf.
• Forgetting that a country and its capital can have quite different names, and that Turkey is only partly in Asia.