The Mitten Book Winter Speech and Language Activities

Reading The Mitten Book is one of my very favorite winter speech and language activities.

Perfect for winter speech and language therapy, this sweet and simple story offers many opportunities for working on language skills. The story is a Ukrainian Folktale beautifully re-told and illustrated by Jan Brett.

The Mitten Story: Best-Ever Winter Storybooks for Speech Therapy www.speechsproutstherapy.com

The story is about a young boy named Nikki who wanted snow-white mittens.

His very wise grandmother, Baba, didn’t think that was a very good idea. Nikki might lose them in the snow. But she knits them for him anyway. Sure enough, he does lose them!

What child can’t relate to getting so busy playing that they have lost an item? (Judging from the many, many jackets that are left on our school playground, I think it’s most of them!)

Pretty soon a little mole discovers the mitten and burrows inside to stay warm. He is soon joined by a series of forest animals: a hedgehog, rabbit, owl, fox, badger, and even a bear. The mitten stretches and stretches as each animal wiggles in. Finally one more animal, a tiny, tickly field mouse arrives to sit on the bear’s nose. Bear sneezes, the mitten explodes, and animals scatter everywhere!

Nikki catches his mitten in the air and heads home to a confused grandmother, who can’t imagine how Nikki stretched the mitten out.

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Here’s why this is a terrific book for language development:

1. Children can relate to the busy boy who loses his mitten. It’s a perfect jumping-off point for story-telling. Did you ever lose something? What happened? How did you feel? Did you ever find it? How did Baba feel at the end of the story?

2. Animals: Children love re-telling a story with animals. What fun to have this delightful series of forest creatures. It’s a great opportunity to introduce some new vocabulary like hedgehog and badger.

3. Simple repetitive plots such as this one aid young children in comprehension and story-retelling.

4. Sequencing. First, the mole squeezed in, then the hedgehog, then…..

5. Verbs: Lots of great action words to discuss: knitted, dropped, tunneled, hopped, snuffled, swooped, poked, lumbered, swelled, tickled, scattered, caught.

6. Describing and categories. The hedgehog was covered in prickles. How did they feel? What else is sharp?

Winter speech and language activities and game Ideas:

I love using hands-on art activities, so creating our very own mittens will be perfect! There are plenty of fun ideas on Pinterest, see some on my Winter Pinterest board HERE.

If you have a die-cut machine at school, you can cut out plenty of mittens and add articulation words, synonyms or antonyms.

For young children, hide some mittens and play Where is the Mitten? Where did you find it? Under, behind, on top?

The Mitten No-Print Winter Speech TherapyBook Companion

If you love using book companions in speech therapy, check out these no-prep activities to accompany this wonderful book.

I needed some great therapy activities to use this winter after reading the book. My students really enjoyed my other no-print language units, so I designed this one with several fun interactive activities.

Note: This activity includes companion activities only, the book is not included, and should be purchased separately.

This fun winter speech and language activity is resource interactive: you can use on a computer, tablet, or an interactive whiteboard. I’m fortunate to have a whiteboard, and it’s great to have for group story time. I have the children take turns to come up to touch each answer. I also use it on my iPad, as shown in the pictures.

The Mitten: No-Print Story Companion includes five winter speech and language activities: Wh and Yes/No questions, simple analogies, describing, and story re-tell. Both text and pictured answers are included, so both readers and non-readers can answer the questions.