Oymyakon: The Coldest Place on Earth (C1)

What is it like to live where winter never lets go? This lesson dives into the Siberian village of Oymyakon, the coldest inhabited place on the planet. Students explore how people adapt to −50 °C, practise advanced language, and debate what “livable” really means.

What you’ll find inside:

• Warm-up

10 discussion starters on extreme weather, resilience, and human limits.

• 2 short videos about the coldest town on Earth

Watch the clips, answer T/F statements, and react to striking facts. Work with guiding questions that lead to deeper reflection on science, folklore, and daily hacks.

• Reading: The extreme cold can also transform the human body

Article adapted from Forbes on physiology, technology, and community life; followed by comprehension questions.

• Share your thoughts

30+ prompts on survival tech, mental health in darkness, cultural identity, climate migration.

• Vocabulary practice

40+ items related to extreme cold, danger, and cold-themed idioms (e.g. snowball effect, walk on thin ice, give somebody a cold shoulder, perilous, insulation, a flamethrower, and more) covered through matching, gap‑fills, and sentence creation.

• Role-based debate

Take roles (environmental scientist, local resident, culture expert, gov official) to argue if life in Oymyakon should continue.