Best Winter Speech and Language Books for Therapy

Mary also loved using The Mitten.  Here are her ideas:

1. Pre-K activity – masking tape mitten on floor.  Last year I made it even more fun and used a large parachute with students in the pre-k artic program (i.e., PEAR Program in the Round Rock Independent School District) and let them crawl under the parachute (into the mitten).  You could even give them masks for all of the animals to pretend, or they could practice saying, “I am in the mitten.  Joey is not in the mitten…”

 Click here for this idea from teachpreschool.org:  I had a large mitten shape made out of tape on the floor to use as our mitten prop. Instead of animals, we had children climbing in our mitten to keep warm.  As the story went along, each child was invited to climb into the mitten and since our mitten was getting full, the children had to adjust how they sat in the mitten so they would all fit inside.  And at the end of our story, all the children were thrown out of the mitten because someone gave a big sneeze! Only our mitten didn’t fall apart!

2. Compare and Contrast with similar story The Hat
A great lesson with the books The Mitten and The Hat is to compare and contrast the two books with your class. As a group, complete a Venn Diagram on the two stories. Click here to download one – enlarge it to use with your class. After you have compared the two books as a class, have you students team with a buddy and complete a compare and contrast sheet. Click here to download a Compare and Contrast activity sheet you can use with your students.

Spanish versions of these two books:  El Miton and El Sombrero

Mitten sentence strip_Spanish The Mitten 1 The Mitten_glove_animals_BW The Mitten_glove_BW The Mitten_story props_color

Those Shoes: by Maribeth Boelts

“Those Shoes, by Maribeth Boelts, is a book that resonates with the heart.  Jeremy wants a pair of those shoes, the ones everyone seems to be wearing. His grandma says they don’t have room for “wants”.  As someone who grew up with humbling financial means, this book surely validates feelings of envy we all have as children.  Not only is this a great book for literacy-based interventions, but it teaches students about culture, friendship and, essentially, the ins-and-outs of life.”   – Phuong

Links and Activities:

Organize a clothing (and shoe) drive for children
Have students draw a pair of desired shoes–Compare and contrast shoes
Have student do a story retell with students on a different campus working on the same skills via Skype

Froggy Gets Dressed: by Jonathan London

“I love this book for winter-themed therapy. It is a cumulative story, based around a central theme of getting dressed.  Each time Froggy goes outside to play in the snow, he has forgotten an article of clothing.   So, he has to come back inside and take everything off in order to put on what he was missing.”                                                                                         – Alyson

Links and Activities:

 I use this book to target a few commonly addressed goals:

• Categorization (clothing, things that are cold)
• Sequencing for how to get dressed (in the correct order)
• Artic- there are many opportunities for initial /fr/ and final /s/, in English and Spanish
• Syntax- there are repetitive lines on each page, describing Froggy either putting on or taking off different articles of clothing
• Who, what, where, when, and why questions 

There are TONS of other resources out there to use along with this story that I love to use as pre- and/or post-reading activities:

• Froggy pictures and manipulatives (as well as English sight words that are great to use for syntactic goals): 
• Froggy Gets Dressed Fun Pack
• Winter clothing paperdolls

The Snowy Day by Ezra Keats

“This book is an opportunity to target adjectives “slow” and “fast” to describe how the boy moved his feet in the snow and slid down the hill. You can also have your children explain the sequence of events that occurred during the story.  If it is appropriate for your students, you can read and complete activities for this story in Spanish one week and then in the following week, read and complete activities for the story in English.”  – Carolyn

Snowmen at Night: By Caralyn Buehner

“I love using multiple snowman books for narrative development.  The character (the snowman) and the place (outside, winter) stay the same so the children can compare and contrast the plot of the stories.  My all-time favorite is Snowmen at Night.  It is a fantastical story about what happens at night when we are all asleep.”                                                      – Scott

There are 24 pages that can be used in therapy such as compare and contrast and WH questions in our Storybook Intervention Templates.

Additional Snowman Favorites

We are excited to share our best winter speech and language books!  Do you have a favorite?  Please share with us!