Snow Much Fun!
I woke up to this beautiful blanket of snow and I was inspired to write a blog post about some of my favorite ideas for bringing snow into the speech room! These would also be fun winter carryover activities for home speech and language practice. You may have seen my guest blog post over at Itty Bitty Speech summarizing some of my favorite Winter Speech Therapy Ideas. Living in the beautiful state of Colorado (About me), we can get a LOT of snow so I am always looking for new winter speech therapy activities. While it would be possible to take speech therapy sessions outside, it is much easier to bring the snow inside! You can fill a bin with snow or simply put it on a tray for the ultimate sensory experience! This post summarizes my favorite winter speech therapy activities that use real snow. (Mittens optional!)
* Just a note that all of these activities can be completed with white playdough, white cloud dough, or white play foam if you don’t have access to real snow!
Just Add Snow!
Snow can add so many opportunities for language development to any play set. Simply add little people or favorite characters to the snow and target just about any skill! Language students can practice expanding utterances, answering questions, following directions, and specific grammatical markers. You can use small containers to build a snow fort or igloo and practice prepositions (in, on, behind, in front, next to, under). Social skills groups can practice play skills, taking turns, and cooperative play. You can even weave articulation skills into the activity by adding objects with targeted speech sounds. S blends are a natural choice to target during this winter activity (snow, scarf, sled, ski, skate, snowball, slip, scoop, spill, etc).
Build a Mini Snowman!
Do you wanna build a snowman? You can! Years ago, I cut some mini scarves out of felt and used some old baby socks to make mini hats. You can also add buttons and mini branches for the arms. These little snowmen have paper carrot noses and black peppercorn eyes. Just a reminder that you could always use white playdough or white cloud dough if you don’t have access to real snow. This winter activity offers so many opportunities for language development. For example, you could target clothing vocabulary, body part vocabulary), answering questions, expanding utterances, and following directions. When I have a group working on social skills, I set up the activity so they have to ask each other for needed materials. For example, I will give all of the scarves to one child, all of the hats to a different child and all of the buttons to another child. This is a great way to practice initiating and requesting items.
What's in the Snowball?
Full Disclosure: This section was taken directly from my Itty Bitty Speech blog post on Winter Speech Therapy Ideas but I couldn’t resist adding it to show how you can also use real snow!
A common game in our speech room is “What’s in the Hat?”. There are many variations of this game (What’s in the box? What’s in the bag? What’s in the stocking?). During the winter months, we play, “What’s in the snowball?”. We use white play foam, white play dough, or REAL SNOW. During this game, we take turns hiding a polar animal (or any miniature object) in the “snowball”. Itty bitty Speech has a Polar Animal unit that would pair nicely with this game to teach polar animal vocabulary and provide visuals during the activity as well as a FREE Polar Animals Bingo Game, and a Polar Animals Send Home Language Unit. There are a few different ways that you can play, depending on your student’s goals:
- Receptive Language: Have your student listen to clues and try to guess the item inside the snowball.
- Descriptive Language: Have your student describe the item inside the snowball using descriptive language (e.g., EET strategies).
- Social Language: One person hides an item inside the snowball. Other group members take turns asking questions and trying to guess the item inside.
- Articulation: Students can practice their articulation skills in sentences as they play this game. You could even hide articulation objects inside the snowballs.
Polar Play
I love adding polar animals to snow! This is a fun way to practice arctic animal vocabulary. You can also practice prepositions, expanding utterances, describing, following directions, etc. Build an igloo out of snow and practice prepositions (in, on, under, behind, in front, etc). The picture above shows how I added playmobil ice fishermen and a small bowl of water to the tray. Check out my Itty Bitty Speech blog post to see a similar ice fishing activity that you can create by freezing a bin of water overnight (photo below).
Please Share!
I hope you found a few new winter speech therapy ideas to try. I’m always looking for new ideas as well. Please share your favorite activities by commenting below!
