How coffee keeps us awake

Flipped lesson plan: How coffee keeps us awake -  BUY ME A COFFEE if you like my FREE ESL content

This advanced (B2 and above) worksheet is about the world's favourite drug: caffeine! It explores how caffeine affects our nervous system, based on a TED-Ed video. In addition, students will learn idioms and phrasal verbs related to sleep, and study the history of coffee in the ancient world and in 1940s Italy.

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Lesson outcomes: 

  1. Learn idioms and phrasal verbs related to sleep and see them in context (e.g. lie in, hit the hay, burn the candle at both ends)
  2. Watch and discuss a Ted-Ed video on the effect of caffeine on the nervous system, using specialised biological vocabulary (e.g. neurons, neurotransmitters, adenosine, dopamine)
  3. Study five attempts to ban coffee, spanning from Mecca in 1511 to Prussia in 1777 (advanced vocabulary: paraphernalia, clergymen, confiscate)
  4. Discover why Italian baristas, who are so proud of their nation's coffee, serve something they call an 'americano' (coffee-related vocabulary: bitter, frothy, to down an espresso)

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