It’s the most, wonderful time, of the year! Okay, while it might be the most wonderful, it can also be the most stressful… so let me help ease your mind and take some stress off your plate with these simple, no-prep speech therapy winter activities for all your kiddos! I use all of these ideas in my own speech room every year. To learn more about me and my journey as a school SLP click here.
To make sure you can always get access to my latest tips and newest freebies, enter your email address below.
Winter Themed Speech Therapy Ideas
Picture this: it’s the Monday after Thanksgiving break, you’re still in a daze from all your turkey, crazy shopping hours, getting all the decorations up, etc., etc., etc. Wow, the holidays are exhausting! And you realize you haven’t thought a bit about your therapy plans. What in the world are you going to do to fill the time these next 3 weeks? AND keep your crazy, excited kiddos engaged!? No worries! I got you covered.
Winter Articulation Printables
Who doesn’t love a quick, easy printable when you’re in a pinch (especially this time of year)! I have some fun winter speech therapy activities for a variety of articulation sounds and phonological patterns in my tpt store. These speech therapy winter activities are perfect for getting in multiple drills in the therapy room and to send home winter themes speech therapy ideas for homework practice with caregivers. Winter and Christmas speech therapy activities are so fun and motivating for our students. The following sounds are included: CV & VC words, CVC words, multisyllabic words, /k, g/, /t, d/, /s, z/ /s/ blends, /l, r/, /l/ blends, /r/ blends, & /sh, ch, dg/ with the following sounds for each:
- Roll & Color pages for all sounds + 1 blank
- Stamp and Say Pages (3 styles) for all sounds + 3 blank
- Cut & Paste picture scenes (3 styles) for all sounds
These worksheets can be used in isolation to target students’ articulation goals or they are also perfect to use within the cycles approach.
- Pair a dice with the Roll & Color pages for a simple game in group therapy (each student can have a page with their individual sounds)
- Use the Stamp and Say pages with crayons, markers, stamps, etc. for a quick, simple way to get 50+ trials
- Use the Cut & Paste pages for a simple, no-prep craft that students can take home for extra practice
Winter Speech Therapy Ideas
These graphic organizers were designed to assist students in oral and written descriptions. Students can use the graphic organizers to fill in descriptors (e.g, category, function, location, adjectives, parts/accessories, etc.) and then use their notes to orally describe the item or write a few sentences about it (depending on their age/level). There is also a list of sentence starters to assist students who may need a higher level of support. Click here to grab these ready-to-use Christmas and Winter graphic organizers now.
If you want to use your own photos or pictures to go with a specific theme or book, then grab these blank graphic organizers in my freebie library. Link to open in google slides so you can insert any picture you want!
Christmas Speech Therapy Activities
Time to get a little creative with our speech therapy winter activities now! To be honest, crafts are not always my favorite. I get really excited about planning and prepping for them, and I love displaying the final result, but actually doing them tends to stress me out. It’s always such a mess! But this time of year I just can’t help myself so give me all of the cute Christmas crafts and printables!
Speech Therapy Christmas Crafts
For a fun and simple Christmas craft, here is “Build your own Christmas Tree!” This printable craft is available in my freebie library and includes a print and go option in color or black and white templates to print and cut out on cardstock/construction paper, or white paper for coloring. Both are great options for an engaging activity to incorporate lots of trials for articulation or tons of describing opportunities for language goals. Just grab any word lists, picture cards, etc. to target students’ individual goals on each turn. And in the end, your students get a unique, adorable craft that they can take home and share with their families.
More Free Christmas Speech Therapy activities
I owe all the credit for this entire themed unit to 2 sweet littles on my caseload last year who LOVED unicorns with all their hearts! They had unicorn outfits for every season of the year and were always dressed to perfection. So I planned and created some of these unicorn Christmas activities and had them ready to go for after Thanksgiving break. Then these 2 walked into therapy the week before Thanksgiving in head-to-toe holiday unicorn outfits for Christmas pictures that day… well, I couldn’t resist and we broke these out a little early. Click to grab these free unicorn dot pages in my store.
Christmas Speech Therapy Activities
One of my favorite, super-simple go-to activities for this crazy time of year (especially when have to combine groups or have larger groups) is a musical stepping stones game with Christmas music.
- First, I put out pictures in a large circle around the room*
- I put velcro on the back of mine because I have carpet squares in my room, but you could do tape too if you have tile (to prevent slipping)
- When the students arrive I have them each stand on a picture
- We review the rules (e.g., no running, no skipping in line, when the music stops, you stop, etc.)
- I start the music! In this case, our favorite Christmas tunes!
- When the music stops, they stop on whatever picture they are on/closest to and complete their individual task (say the word with their target sound, answer a wh question about it, describe it, use it in a sentence, etc.)
*Pictures – can be pictures with target sounds (I usually use a lot of blends because I can target so many goals with those), action pictures for questions or describing, nouns for describing, colors to go with the EET (Expanding Expression Tool by Sara Smith) beads, symbols to go with story grammar parts, the possibilities are endless!
Christmas Books for Speech Therapy
Books give you so much bang for your buck when it comes to speech and language goals and there are so many good Christmas/holiday options.
Santa Calls by William Joyce
This is book is not as well known as some others, and I’ll admit, I had never heard of it until my SLP friend and mentor shared it with me. She said it was one of her all-time favorites with her own children and would read it to our students every year. We spent weeks on this book and did a whole unit on it because it is so language-rich. (It is also quite lengthy, so hard to fit all into one session). There are tons of good vocabulary terms in this book and the kids literally hang onto every word. They could not wait to get to the next section of the book each session. We found that it was most appropriate for our 4th and 5th graders, I think it would work with middle schoolers as well.
It’s about a little boy who lost his parents, his sister, and friend. It takes place in Texas and goes through their adventures to the North Pole. The ending of the story is absolutely beautiful, so I won’t ruin it for you, but I will tell you I cry every single time. The last year my friend read this with our kids (before she moved on to a different position) I was 9 months pregnant, and I can assure you there were ugly tears!
Best Christmas Books for Speech Therapy
Below are some more of my favorite Christmas books and some notes on how I use them
- Polar Express – vocabulary, story retell, answering questions
- How the Grinch Stole Christmas – story retell, sequencing, character description
- Bear Stays Up for Christmas – sequencing, simple questions, verbs, basic concepts
- Mooseltoe – character description, story retell
- Never Let a Unicorn Meet a Reindeer! – compare/contrast, story retell
For more Speech Therapy Winter Activities and Ideas:
12 FREE CHRISTMAS ACTIVITIES FOR SPEECH THERAPY from Ashley Rossi
Speech Therapy Christmas Tree Activities from Speech Therapy Talk Services, LLC
5 EASY SPEECH THERAPY IDEAS USING COMMON CHRISTMAS ITEMS from Allison Fors
Don’t forget to sign up with your email address here to get access to my free library (growing weekly) full of some of my goodies made exclusively for my followers.
I hope you found some of these ideas helpful and can use one or more in your therapy room this season. Please leave a comment or shoot me an email if you want to share some of your favorite speech therapy winter activities.
One Response
Great content! Keep up the good work!