Winter Speech Therapy Lesson Plan Activities For Adolescents and Young Adults

Are you in need of a winter speech therapy lesson plan for use with older students and home health clients? As a Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) who works with children and adults of all ages, I love themes just as much as any other SLP. In fact, I have folders on my computer for just about every theme you can think of. Google is a pretty reliable resource to locate all things thematic, but the struggle for me has always been finding age-appropriate printable resources, books, videos, articles, and everything else in between for my adolescent and young adult students and clients that I service. Most things out there contain immature content and images for this older population, who rightfully deserve resources that are age-appropriate and relevant to their activities of daily living. 

It’s taken me over a decade to sit down and finally put these out on paper, but I’ve gathered up some of my favorite winter resources that I use with my adolescent and young adult population that I service during the winter months. 

Boom Cards™ 

I love working on verbal reasoning, executive functioning, and social competencies by breaking these activities up by theme with corresponding, age-appropriate winter picture scenes and hypothetical scenarios. Providing students with resources that are highly relevant within their activities of daily living allows them the opportunity to work on these skills in a safe environment to help them practice for real-world experiences. Boom Cards™ are a great fit for most adolescent and young adult students due to their digital nature and ability for students and clients to directly interact with the activities. My Life Skills Solving Problems Winter Edition is leveled with a multiple choice option and an open response option for students to either select the best choice or come up with their own response on how to handle a variety of hypothetical situations that may occur in the winter, when provided with a real-life, corresponding image. 

My Winter Idioms in Context deck is leveled for higher level language and allows adolescent and young adults to work on figurative language when winter idioms are used on context. There is a multiple choice option to select the best description of target idioms, as well as an open response box for students and clients to generate their own sentence for a provided idiom. 

Winter Themed Asking Questions Topic Maintenance is one of my Boom Cards™ decks designed to give students and clients practice in generating a question using an open response text box, when provided with a conversation partner and a real-life, corresponding image. These digital task cards are a great way to practice the “tossing” back-and-forth of a conversation, and all hypothetical conversations and images are related to a winter theme. 

Working on sequencing activities of daily living is one of my favorite ways to work on life skills! My Winter 3&4 Step Sequencing Boom Cards™ deck consists of 12 different functional activities of daily living in which students are asked to sequence the real life pictures to describe a familiar ADL using either 3 steps or 4 steps, all related to a winter theme. 

Problem solving is a wonderful skill to target to help older students and young adults practice identifying problems and verbalizing solutions to common difficult scenarios that might occur during activities. In these Christmas Themed Problem Solving Boom Cards™, students are presented with 25 digital task cards and a corresponding real-life image, and asked to identify the problem in each scenario, as well as identify one way to solve the problem. Students are provided with an open response text box and all responses are accepted.

Print & Go

My Following a Budget FREE Print & Go resource is a great way for adolescent and young adults to work on life skills and following a budget when shopping. With all of the shopping and money we end up spending in the winter months with various holidays, this FREE resource is a fantastic way for students and adults to get practice identifying whether or not items are within their designated budget, and stimulates great conversations during therapy sessions. This is exclusive to my email providers, but can be accessed by signing up for the newsletter by clicking on the image below. 

Are you looking for ways to work on social language and functional communication with middle school, high school, and young adults on social language and problem solving? This is a static PDF with 10 social situations containing high quality, real life pictures!

Students are given a target situation and are asked to identify facial expressions,  gestures, problems, solutions, and relate personal experiences. This is exclusive to my newsletter subscribers can be can accessed through my FREEBIE LIBRARY. Click on the image below to sign up. 

This 4-Step Sequencing Winter Edition is one of my favorite ways to work on sequencing winter activities of daily living, including, but not limited to decorating a Christmas tree, shoveling snow, getting dressed for winter, and making hot cocoa. All 12 of these activities include 4-steps per task, and contain a short description and corresponding picture for each step. This is exclusive to my email providers, but can be accessed by signing up for the newsletter by clicking on the image below. 

Reading Passages for Older Students

Online reading passages are great for adolescent and young adults to work on visualization and making connections, sequencing, summarizing, identifying the main idea and supporting details, and comprehension. There are far too many winter reading passages to list here, but here are some of my favorite reading passages from ReadWorks and National Geographic Kids. 

Winter Workouts
Cold Feet
Learning To Skate
Wrapping Up a Little Bit of Trouble
Let It Snow
Fascinating Ways Animals Prepare for Winter
Weird But True Winter Facts
What’s The Winter Solstice

Video Clips and Commercials

I love using video clips in my therapy session to work on drawing inferences, making predictions, problem solving, identifying and describing emotions, and identifying cause/effect. Wordless short films are always my favorite, but I also love winter commercials and especially Ellen’s Epic or Fail Winter Edition. Here are some of my favorite winter video clips and commercials that are great to use during therapy sessions. 

Lily and the Snowman
Ellen’s Epic or Fail Winter Edition
The Spark
Hey Deer
John Lewis Trampoline Christmas Advert
Mog’s Christmas Calamity
M&S 2016 Christmas Ad
Erste Christmas Ads

It is true that even our older students and young adults love a good winter theme, and it is possible to find content and images that are age-appropriate for this population. What are some of your favorite winter-themed activities and resources to use with older students and young adults? Let me know in the comments. 

Don’t forget to pin this post to your speech therapy Pinterest board!