5 Polar Animal Activities for Speech Therapy with a Free Download

Using animals during the winter season is always an engaging theme, and I've got 5 different ways for you to use it in your speech therapy sessions!

Read Aloud

The Way Home for Wolf by Rachel Bright has become one of my favorite stories this time of year. It introduces several different kinds of arctic animals, who help the wolf pup find his way back to his family. The author uses really descriptive vocabulary and its plot is perfect for retelling. It's a sweet story and the illustrations are beautiful, I know your kids will love it!

Craft

Speaking of wolves, how about this cute handprint craft? This one is super easy without a big mess! All you need is white and blue construction paper. Then, have your students trace their hand and cut it out, add one large triangle for the head and two small ones for the ears. You can use this as a wrap-up to the story or on its own as a reinforcement activity. Another idea is to add words around the fox as the ‘snowflakes', try articulation targets, verbs, or vocabulary from the story.

Sensory Bin

Winter sensory bins are so easy…just add cotton! For this one, I paired it with nonfiction task cards about different polar animals. It would also work great with some mini erasers or toy animals if you have them, but if you don't, you can use pictures of the animals!

Graphic Organizers

Nonfiction activities are perfect for working on many academic skills, like main idea & details, descriptive facts, and compare & contrast. Graphic organizers are a proven way to help our students extrapolate information to make it make sense. Simple webs like this are easy to make/draw, but you can also find them in this resource.

Barrier Games

Barrier games are an amazing way to work on things like basic concepts, following directions, and vocabulary. You just print as many picture scenes as you have students, and give them pieces to manipulate. So for this theme, I did a snowy scene and the different cold-weather animals. You can give instructions as a group, or have the students give the instructions, then when you're done have them compare their scenes. It's an awesome way to collect some quick data! You can find this one here.

BONUSES!

• Check out Explore.org of some live feeds of different animal cams! You can catch polar bears, penguins, and tons of other wildlife in zoos and nature preserves.
• Make sure you are following me on Instagram (@crazyspeechworld), I teamed up with the theme therapy queen, Felice from The Dabbling Speechie to share so many ideas for this theme this week (1/17/22).
• Sign up for my weekly roundup and get these free open ended activities with polar bears and penguins:::