Ways to Promote Language Development During the Winter Months

Written by: Brittany Medeiros, M.S., CCC-SLP, Spaulding Outpatient Center for Children in Lexington

Winter is a great time to work on promoting language development in a less structured, yet functional way. Despite the cold weather and short days, there are so many ways to target language goals during fun, winter activities without your child even realizing they are working on building their language skills. Here are a few winter activities, indoor and outdoor, to work on promoting language development during the winter months.

For more information or to schedule a speech and language evaluation at Spaulding Outpatient Center for Children in Lexington, please contact our front desk at 781-860-1742.

Ways to Promote Language Development During the Winter Months

1. Talk about/ engage in winter activities: play in the snow, build a snowman or go sledding
   1. Talk about the actions you do while sledding such as going/ stopping, pulling (up the hill), pushing (down the hill).
   2. Talk about going ice skating, skiing, snowboarding as well as the clothes and items needed to do each of these winter activities.
   3. Go for a winter walk and talk about similarities and differences between winter and the other seasons: What animals do you see? What activities are happening? How are the colors of the environment different? How is the temperature different?
   4. Talk about the actions that may happen while building a snowman (e.g., rolling, melting) as well as body parts/ clothing that will be included on the snowman. (After exposing your child to these actions, ask your child WH questions to promote usage of these actions performed during the winter months.)
   5. Incorporate describing words such as color, temperature, size, feelings about sledding, playing in the snow and building snowmen to build descriptive language.
   6. Discuss appropriate sequence of actions during these winter activities- talk about what you will do first, next, then and last and then have your child retell the steps to you.
2. Read winter- themed books
   1. Ask questions (e.g., yes/no, WH and open-ended) during joint story book reading in order to build overall receptive and expressive language skills.
   2. Work on predicting and inferencing skills by asking your child what they think will happen next in the winter-themed story.
   3. Work on auditory memory and story re-telling by having your child re-tell the story you read.
   4. Build winter vocabulary by labeling pictures in winter-themed books.
   5. Talk about the actions you can do in the winter and the clothes you may wear during the winter months.
3. Sing winter themed songs to build language skills
   1. Repetitive lines of songs give children multiple opportunities to practice sentences of increasing length and complexity.
   2. Many winter-themed songs include/ repeat thematic vocabulary words multiple times throughout a song which will promote your child’s overall expressive vocabulary skills through repeated exposure.
   3. Sing songs softly/ loudly, quickly/ slowly, with different tones/ voices as well as different pitches (high/ low).
   4. Incorporate gestures and props into your winter-themed songs in order to promote multi-modal learning (e.g., language, fine motor, gross motor skills) while getting your child moving around.
4. Do winter crafts
   1. Make “snowmen” using playdoh while talking about colors, sizes, shapes and actions.
   2. Talk about different animals you see in the winter and make animal tracks with toy animals in playdoh “snow”.
   3. Make “snowmen” out of preferred, novel and non-preferred food while exposing your child to different foods/ textures and talking about likes/ dislikes.
   4. Make shaving cream snow- talk about the ingredients needed and the steps to make the “snow”. After making the “snow”, use describing words to talk about what it looks like and feels like.