Alliances and the Causes of WWI
- Slide deck
- Guided notes
- Guided notes teacher key
- Activity + answer key
- Quiz (paper + self-grading Google Form) + answer key
- Exit ticket + answer key
- Teacher guide
- Teacher presentation notes
From one teacher to another
The alliance system is the part of WWI that makes the whole war look inevitable in hindsight and completely avoidable close up, and that tension is what I wanted this lesson to sit inside instead of resolve. One assassination shouldn't cascade into a continental war, and working out exactly how the alliances turned a regional crisis into a world war is the actual thinking work here, not memorizing which country signed which treaty.
I built it to open the WWI unit, so it's doing double duty: teaching the alliance system on its own terms and setting up why the war spreads the way it does once the fighting starts.
The activity carries its own answer key, the slides have guided notes bound to them, and the quiz and exit ticket grade themselves through Google Forms once a class submits them.