Just because I work at the middle school level doesn’t mean I can’t plan cool themes for my kiddos (yes, my teenagers are still MY kiddos).  Today, I share some winter therapy ideas for  middle school students! It is nice to align activities to seasons because it is relevant to them in the present day!

Some of my students go up to the snow during the winter and the material is more motivating.  You just have to find creative and more mature ways to present the information, so they think it’s cool.  I use a lot of technology with my middle school students and it helps make the activity feel more grown up and modern.  Google and youtube are my best friends!

The Expressive Expanding Tool has been great for some of my students to work on describing items and using the tool as a pre-write.  I just type in specific words in google and use the images to show students the vocabulary word.  If they still don’t know what I am talking about, I look it up on youtube to show them a video.  In the picture above, we were describing a snow blower.  Snow blowers are a bit foreign to us Sacramento folk as we have to drive 2 hours to get to snow!

Did you watch the show America’s Funniest Home Videos when you were a kid?  I can’t believe it’s still on the air, but it is!  I used to love watching that show.  Well, I discovered that there are video clips on youtube from that show and decided to try it out in therapy!  They have some great winter clips!  Here are my ideas for how you can use these clips in therapy:

I have a group of boys that crack jokes and laugh the WHOLE session. They are now working on controlling themselves during my lesson, so they can watch some funny videos at the end of the session.  Once they get their work done, I let them laugh away as they watch the videos!!

Watch the videos to work on perspective taking and what could be in people’s thought bubbles.

With my social skills groups we worked on making predictions about what might happen next in the clip, making comments about the clips, thinking of questions we could ask our peers about the clips and my favorite, wait for it…….thinking of empathetic comments we could say to the people who may have fallen or gotten hurt in the video clips.

I had some of articulation students explain what was happening in the video clips using their best sounds!  Have your students write sentences about the video clips using transition words, conjunctions and adjectives to work on creating more complex sentences!  What else could you target with these funny videos?