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Just because I work at the middle school level doesn’t mean I can’t plan fun, relevant themes for my students (yes, my teenagers are still my kiddos). In this post, I’m sharing winter activities speech therapy ideas that are designed specifically for middle school students.
Using seasonal themes in speech therapy helps keep lessons relevant and engaging for older students—especially those who are quick to complain when activities feel too young. If you’re looking for winter speech therapy activities your middle school students will actually enjoy, you’re in the right place. The ideas below focus on higher-level language skills, inferencing, and age-appropriate materials, no babyish crafts or activities with cartoony pictures.
If you want a ready-to-use winter speech therapy lesson plan for middle school, you can grab my free winter lesson plan to save planning time with the winter Epic or Fail videos from The Ellen Show.
Winter is the perfect season to incorporate engaging activities that align with speech and language goals for middle school students. Using seasonal themes, you can work on a variety of skills such as answering and asking WH-questions, crafting narratives, perspective-taking, identifying non-verbal body language, building vocabulary, summarizing, and story retell. Winter-themed YouTube videos are a fantastic way to spark discussions, create story prompts, or explore character emotions and perspectives. My podcast episode on winter YouTube videos for older students and these winter YouTube video ideas offer a variety of strategies and video suggestions to build engaging and meaningful lessons. These tools not only keep students engaged but also encourage deeper connections with their speech and language goals in a fun, seasonal context.
Using winter-themed Simon’s Cat wordless short videos is an engaging way to address mixed groups in speech therapy sessions. These humorous, non-verbal videos, available on the Simon’s Cat YouTube channel, are perfect for targeting articulation, language, and social skills. Students can describe the events using their target sounds, practice sequencing the story, or identify character emotions and intentions to work on perspective-taking and inferencing. To make planning even easier, my 3-page cheat sheets and graphic organizers align with six winter-themed Simon’s Cat videos. These resources are no-prep, allowing you to effortlessly address multiple goals in one session while keeping students engaged with the fun and relatable scenarios.
Need winter activities for speech therapy with your older students that are low prep? You will love all these quick lesson plan ideas for middle school. First, I am a BIG fan of using America’s Funniest Home Videos in speech with older students. You can use the winter versions as an engaging speech and language activity.
For speech and language resources to use with older speech students, check these out:
Middle School Winter Print N’ Go
Winter Themed Build a Sentence Grammar Worksheets
Winter Inference Picture Task Cards
Winter-Themed Simon’s Cat YouTube Video cheat sheets
Bilinguistics has a great blog post with some winter-themed poems and ideas for how to use them in sessions.
Save time planning for your older speech therapy students using this list of YouTube videos.
NewsELA has a lot of winter non-fiction passages that are great for this age.
Working on social pragmatics with middle schoolers during the winter season can be both fun and effective by incorporating engaging video clips and creative activities. For example, you can use America’s Funniest Videos with a winter theme to practice various social and language skills while keeping students entertained. Here are two clips to get started: Winter Fails Compilation and Snow Day Fails.
Skills to Target with Winter Video Clips:
If you’re an SLP working with kindergarten through middle school students, the Themed Therapy SLP Membership might be the perfect solution for covering your elementary caseload. This membership provides access to ready-to-go, themed materials that save you time and keep your sessions engaging. Whether you’re focusing on articulation, language, social pragmatics, or inferencing, you’ll find resources designed to help you target multiple goals with ease.
Explore how this membership can transform your therapy planning at www.themedtherapyslp.com/membership. It’s an all-in-one option for busy SLPs working with preschool and elementary looking to streamline their prep and maximize their impact in sessions.
In addition to video clips, incorporate interactive winter activities for speech therapy like the Snowball Fight Conversation Winter Game from my Winter Speech and Language Activities for Middle School. This game encourages students to practice conversational turn-taking, asking follow-up questions, and making comments—all while enjoying the fun and competitive atmosphere of a “snowball fight.”
Pairing videos with structured activities like these not only sparks laughter but also opens opportunities for meaningful social and language practice. These ideas can seamlessly tie into other winter speech and language activities, helping students connect their learning to real-life interactions.
Inferencing is a critical skill for middle school students, and winter-themed materials make it both engaging and relevant. These winter speech therapy activities work especially well for older students because they rely on real-world context rather than babyish visuals.
Using real photos of winter activities—like those in my Winter Inferencing Resource—gives students practice drawing conclusions based on visual clues, background knowledge, and context. Students can make predictions, explain character motivations, and identify emotions or intentions shown in each scene, making this an effective option for language therapy and mixed groups.
Another high-interest option for winter activities speech therapy is incorporating Simon’s Cat videos. These short, wordless clips are ideal for targeting inferencing skills because students must interpret actions, reactions, and environmental cues to understand what’s happening. To save planning time, my Simon’s Cat inferencing cheat sheets include ready-to-use prompts and graphic organizers that guide students through inferencing, predictions, and higher-level language tasks.
If you love using wordless short videos in your speech therapy sessions to work on inferencing, prediction and perspective taking, here are some of my faves:
Planning engaging sessions for older students can be a challenge, but using The Ellen Show’s Epic or Fail video clips makes it easy to capture their attention while working on important speech and language goals. These video clips are perfect for targeting prediction skills, cause and effect, describing, making inferences, and more. Here are some winter-themed options to try in your sessions:
Pair these clips with my Winter Speech Therapy Lesson Plan, which provides a variety of strategies for structuring sessions. This lesson plan is ideal for mixed groups, offering ideas for articulation and language goals, as well as a link to a free Winter Word Association Google Slide graphic organizer. This tool allows students to brainstorm related words while practicing their speech and language skills in a structured and interactive way.
Using these video clips alongside the lesson plan will keep your older students engaged while effectively targeting multiple goals in a winter-themed context.
Winter-themed materials are a great way to help middle school students practice sentence structure and build complex sentences. A versatile tool to support this is my free sentence structure graphic organizer. It can be used with winter-themed photos, picture scenes, wordless short videos, or any engaging clip to help students expand their sentences. You can easily find real photos on websites like Pixabay or Google Photos to spark creativity and discussion.
For more structured practice, my Winter Build a Sentence resource includes real photos paired with activities that help students work on WH-questions, vocabulary, verb tense, describing, and inferencing. It’s an all-in-one tool to target multiple language skills while focusing on sentence building.
You can also make learning interactive by using online games like this Winter Sentence Building Game on Baamboozle, which encourages students to construct sentences in a fun, engaging format.
By combining these resources and tools, you can give students a variety of ways to practice creating compound and complex sentences, strengthening their grammar, and making their language more descriptive and dynamic—all while keeping it fun and winter-themed.
Winter-themed activities offer countless opportunities to help students build their vocabulary while keeping sessions fun and engaging. Here are some ideas and resources to incorporate into your therapy:
By using these tools and activities, you can help your students expand their vocabulary, improve their descriptive language, and build a strong foundation for communication—all while enjoying the winter theme.
If you’re working with preschool through 5th grade students, I share a separate list of winter speech therapy activities designed specifically for younger learners. You’ll find hands-on, developmentally appropriate ideas that work well for articulation and language goals.
Planning winter speech therapy activities for middle school doesn’t have to feel overwhelming. With age-appropriate materials, real-world visuals, and engaging inferencing tasks, you can keep older students motivated while still targeting meaningful language goals.
If you want a done-for-you option, grab my free winter speech therapy lesson plan to try these ideas in an organized, low-prep session.
