Winter Sports Activities to Use in Speech Therapy

Stacy Crouse
Jan 6
4 min read

One of the beauties of teletherapy is that we can (digitally) take our speech therapy students anywhere, so winter sports is one of my favorite themes to include each year. But even for speech-language pathologists working in-person, winter sports is a great, high-interest theme that excites students this time of year.

Activities with action-packed sports topics such as skiing, ice hockey, figure skating, and snowboarding always spark my students' interest in January and February sessions.

Wait. Some speech therapists might be thinking, "But my students don't live in a place with snowy winters where people do winter sports."

That's okay! I've successfully used this winter theme with students in warmer climates, too. In fact, I found that many are very interested in learning about these winter activities they've seen in books, movies, or television (thanks to the Winter Olympics every few years).

So while I got all in on winter sports-themed therapy, I am not the kind of SLP who loves to prep (and store) tons of activities. I'm all about download-and-go and quick printables that can work across your caseload. If that's your style too, check out these speech and language therapy ideas!

Virtual Field Trip

Since many students may not have firsthand experience with winter sports, there are several ways to kick off the theme and introduce vocabulary. I like to use this PDF as a virtual field trip to look at big, real photographs of the sports in action.

a winter sports digital field trip for speech therapy and teletherapy

The pictures elicit a lot of language in and of themselves, but I can also use the built-in prompts on each page to target any number of language concepts.

PDF Activities

For younger students, this winter sports-themed interactive PDF is a great way to dig deeper into the winter sports theme while also honing in on speech and language goals. Using the clickable buttons, fillable text fields, and "checkable" boxes, you can work on anything from description and winter vocabulary to verbs, negation, plural nouns, and even articulation!

a winter sports speech therapy activity being used by a student on an iPad

Books

Search the following book titles/authors wherever you access digital versions of books (your local library, YouTube, websites, online stores, etc.).

Non-Fiction Books

If you use Epic (free for educators), there are endless possibilities! Seriously, just type any winter sport into the search bar. You'll instantly have tons of non-fiction books at your fingertips!

Fiction Books

Learning to Ski with Mr. Magee by Chris Van Dusen
Kamik Joins the Pack by Darryl Baker is a story about sled dogs.
Winter Willpower by Bill Yu is written in a comic book format.
Mice on Ice by Eleanor May is a cute story about mice going ice skating.
Goodnight Hockey Fans by Andrew Larsen is about a boy who dreams about hockey.

Videos

I've created a few videos to help expand students' knowledge of winter sports through lots of visuals.

Provide a brief overview of common winter athletic events as well as more unusual ones (such as biathlon and curling) with a 3.5-minute video.
In this 1.5-minute YouTube video, students learn more in-depth about ice hockey.
This 1.5-minute video teaches about downhill skiing.

Website Games & Other Fun Activities

These sites provide language opportunities and different ways to motivate and excite students in your themed therapy sessions.

Your students will love this video-game-style website that simulates downhill skiing. And here's a similar online game!
PBS Kids has this dogsled activity for younger students. A snowboarding game and this winter games activity are also available on the site.
This Highlights Hidden Picture shows penguins ice skating and is a great way to fill a few minutes at the end of a session.
The website thecolor.com has several online coloring pages, such as i ce skating, hockey, snowboarding, and skiing.
This 8-pair memory game matches words with pictures, while this 17-pair memory game covers many wintertime experiences in Switzerland, including many sporting activities. FYI- you can modify the games to have fewer matches!

Boom™ Cards

This winter sports Boom Card deck (get it here on Boom) helps students build background knowledge and vocabulary through four scaffolded activities: learning about each sport, receptive identification, expressive identification, and answering WH-questions.

a winter sports-themed Boom Card deck being used on an iPad in speech therapy to target wh- questions

The deck features 15 winter sports with visual supports, audio descriptions, and adjustable difficulty, making it easy to target receptive and expressive language skills. Make sure to check out the free video that goes with it– it's a perfect supplement to your winter sports lesson plans!

This set of winter passages (get it here on Boom) includes a short story about ice hockey. It's the perfect way to target reading comprehension, answering wh- questions, making inferences, and more with middle and upper elementary students.

Winter Sports-Themed Activities for Older Students

These winter sports passages include real photos and a range of activities. In addition to comprehension activities, older students can work on language skills such as comparing and contrasting, formulating sentences using theme vocabulary, using a variety of verb tenses and conjunctions, and identifying synonyms and antonyms. There's even a section for articulation students, too!

winter sports passage and language activities for speech therapy

This article on ReadWorks discusses how to exercise outside despite the colder temperatures in the winter months. It also discusses the many benefits of being outside and active in the winter.

This Newsela article shares a bobsledder's initiative to bring diversity and inclusion to winter sports.

This fill-in-the-blanks passage about snowboarding is great for older kids. They'll love adding their own nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. to make the passage a whole lot funnier... aka more engaging! The activity is perfect for targeting a variety of skills in groups. Even if you have an articulation student, use words from these sound-specific word lists.

Regardless of how much snow is (or isn't) on the ground where you live in the winter, your students will love this theme! Forget a week's worth of lesson plans, these activities might have you covered for the whole month!

Need more fun winter themes for your January or February lesson plans? Get ideas for snow, Valentine's Day, and hot chocolate-themed speech therapy sessions!