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8 Easy Winter Animal Activities for Speech Therapy

Are you looking for fresh ideas to keep your speech therapy sessions engaging this winter? Winter animal activities are the perfect way to keep your kids motivated while targeting those speech and language goals.

Winter speech therapy activity with three printable winter animals activities for preschool showing winter animals and their winter homes.

Why Winter Animals?

Animal-themed activities are always a hit with kids. And hibernating winter animals or arctic critters? Even more appealing. Who doesn’t love an adorable polar bear or a waddling penguin? They’re cute, fascinating, and make a great seasonal theme for your preschool speech therapy sessions (and for older kids too.)

Themes like these are perfect for sparking curiosity and creating natural opportunities for learning.

Easy, No-Prep Winter Animal Activities to Try

Here are some winter animal activities that are fun, easy to prep, and can target a range of speech therapy goals. And bonus: most are no-prep for you!

1. Articulation Craft: Build a Winter Animal

Have your students cut, glue, or color pictures of their favorite winter animals while practicing articulation targets. Want done-for-you winter animal activities? Go see this adorable winter articulation craft that includes a penguin and a polar bear.

2. Play Would You Rather…

Would you rather be a penguin or a polar bear? Why? You can elicit lots of great language here. Compare and contrast two winter animals, talk about what they eat, how they move, and where they live. Which one would you rather be?

Great for your older kids, your littles will love this activity too. (And I bet they’ll give you some adorable, funny answers.)

3. Winter Animal Movement Game

Get those wiggles out while practicing following directions. Create a movement-based activity where students can “waddle like a penguin” or “hop like a bunny.” Incorporate simple language goals by having your students describe how each animal moves or where the animal might live (“The penguin is sliding on the ice”).

This activity is perfect for working on spatial concepts and verbs.

4. Describe a Winter Scene

Describe a scene with forest or arctic animals. Use an illustration from your
books or pull up one on YouTube if you don’t have a printable scene.

5. Books About Winter Animals

Storybooks about winter animals are fantastic for building vocabulary, comprehension, and storytelling skills. Kids love anything to do with animals… so why not use it this winter? Here are some great book options:

  • The Mitten by Jan Brett: All the animals crowd into a lost mitten to stay warm. Then what happens? I have a book companion for The Mitten with a ton of activities you may want to check out. You can read more ideas for this wonder story in this post: The Mitten Winter Speech and Language Activities
  • Bear Snores On by Karma Wilson: I love the repetitive text that helps children retell, and it’s loaded with s-blends.
  • Under and Over the Snow by Kate Messner: This story is great for the concepts of over/under, winter animals, adjectives, and birds.
  • Footprints in the Snow by Mei Matsuoka is a story about a nice wolf searching for a new friend in the forest. Lots of initial and final s-blends and forest animal vocabulary.
  • Snack, Snooze, and Skedaddle by Laura Purdie Salas: Interesting facts about how many animals prepare for winter—from butterflies to frogs to foxes. Great for animal vocabulary and WH questions.
  • Wolf in the Snow by Matthew Cordell: Mostly a wordless picture book, perfect for working on story grammar, telling narratives, inference, and final l-blends (wolf).

6. Feed the Animal Game

Create a simple “feed the animal” game using a box decorated as a polar bear or penguin. Use picture cards or small toys for articulation or language practice. (The pictures in my articulation fold-it crafts are great for this!) Students can “feed” the animal as they practice target sounds, answer questions, or name items in a category.

7. Winter Animal Songs and Rhymes

Preschoolers and kindergarteners love rhymes about animals! Check out fun rhymes for everything from penguins to bears on websites like Child Care Lounge. These are perfect for engaging younger students while targeting rhythm, vocabulary, and phonological awareness.

Take a look at this post where you’ll find winter songs and fingerplays too

8. Try these Free Online Winter Animal Activities

  • Sled Dog Dash by PBS Kids: A fun motivational game for elementary students.
  • Artic Animals Memory Game by National Geographic Kids. Talk about the animals you find. You can easily incorporate articulation practice by using a carrier phrase: “I see a ___. for /s/, It’s a funny ___” for /f/ practice, and so on.

The best part about these winter-themed activities is how flexible they are.

Whether you’re working on articulation, language, or social skills, you can adapt them to meet your students’ needs. Think that planning around a theme is complicated? It doesn’t have to be.

My basic recipe is:

  1. Read and discuss 1-2 great books on your theme. There are tons of goal opportunities in almost any book. You’ll want to read the book more than once- over several sessions to really dig into all the language opportunities they offer.
  2. Plan 1-2 additional related activities. These can be simple, little-to-no-prep activities, like the ones above.

Don’t forget to involve your students in the process. Let them pick their favorite animals or come up with movements to act out. The more engaged they are, the more progress you’ll see.

These winter animal activities will make your sessions fun, engaging, and loaded with seasonal vocabulary. With minimal prep, you’ll be able to target a variety of goals while keeping your students interested and motivated. So grab your favorite winter-themed books, print out those pictures, and get ready for some snowy fun in your sessions.

Make it easy when you get this FREE winter animals lesson plan with 29 activity ideas!

I’d love to save you precious planning time and send you an easy-to-reference downloadable list of all these ideas and more for free when you subscribe to my Speech Sprouts email newsletter.

Subscribe here to get the free winter animal activities lesson plan!

You’ll get a downloadable PDF with:

  • the list of winter animal books
  • clickable links to all online resources including:
    • winter animal song videos
    • movement break videos with
    • online activities and games
  • two printable activities plus…
  • all the ideas in this post, and lots more

Planning couldn’t be easier when you have this handy winter animal activities lesson plan to reference. It’s just one of the many exclusive, subscriber-only freebies that I regularly send to my newsletter insiders.

More done-for-you winter-themed activities to make planning a snap:

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