A weather theme might be a no-brainer for preschool, but it is actually great for kids of all ages! I’ve met lots of kids who love vehicles or animals, but a surprising number of kids are really into a weather theme too! Weather is a super functional topic! It’s basically the #1 small talk topic and most classrooms include some kind of talk about the weather into their classroom routines. If you’ve had any severe weather, I find that kids want and need to talk about it to help process their feelings during that episode. Plus, you have a ton of great verbs and science vocabulary all built right into your theme!
One of my favorite benefits of speech therapy themes is that can reduce cognitive load during speech therapy. What do I mean by that? It’s good to keep as much of our therapy as consistent as possible focus on changing the difficulty of the targeted skill. With a theme, you can make a slight change to make the material interesting, but also keep your therapy relatively consistent so you aren’t trying to teach a bunch of concepts all at once.
My Weather Themed Language Therapy Unit for Speech Therapy includes everything, all the stimulus materials and quality graphic organizers you need for just about your whole caseload!
Simple Ways to Have Fun with a Weather Theme in Preschool and Younger Classrooms
Weather Themed Toys and Activities for Preschool and Young Children
For your musical kiddos, I recommend the classic Rain Rain Go Away. It’s also pretty likely that their classrooms have some kind of weather song they are already using that you can use too.
Weather Theme Books for Preschool
If you’re a wordless picture book fan like I am, you probably already know that a lot of them include something about weather!
Some great ones are:
- Float by Daniel Miyares
- Peter Spier’s Rain
- Un-Brella by Scott Franson
- Wolf in the Snow by Matthew Cordell
Target Language with a Weather Theme
There are lots of other simple ways to include the weather theme into your therapy:
- Compare and contrast different types of weather, like snow and rain
- Pretend to be weather reporters to practice articulation or fluency conversational targets
- Using pictures or symbols (I bet your classroom already has some!), ask questions about the weather, like “Which one is bright?” or “Which one is wet?”
- Ask simple wh- questions about weather: What do we wear when it’s raining? When do we shovel the driveway? Where is the sun?
- Target body parts, simple prepositions, and directions with weather-based props. Put the gloves on you hand and stand under the umbrella. Sometimes it’s fun to do a silly direction, like “put the glove on your foot” because when you give a direction of an expected action, it’s hard to tell if the child understands the direction, or if they just know what to do with a glove!
- And most importantly: Listen to what your child says and recast and expand!
More Weather Themed Lesson Plans, Crafts, Activities, and Play-Based Ideas
My seasonal lesson plans each contain 12 themes, with 2 books, 2 activities, and 2 crafts for every theme!
The Spring Speech Therapy Lesson Plans – Crafts, Play-Based Activities, & Literacy includes a rain theme and the Winter Speech Therapy Lesson Plans – Crafts, Play-Based Activities, & Literacy includes a winter theme for cold weather fun!
If you want some weather inspiration, you might want to start with those. If that’s your speech therapy style, you’ll have themes for most of your year with those two products!
Weather Theme Language Speech Therapy Unit
If you’re looking for something more comprehensive, with just about everything you’d want to target in your language therapy, my themed language speech therapy unit is for you!
My themed language units includes all the materials you need to target:
- Core vocabulary (here, good)
- Basic concepts (above, wet)
- Describing (rain, sun, cloud, wind, rainbow)
- Tier 2 vocabulary (change, freeze, severe, extreme, temperature)
- Affixes (fore-, -y)
- Inferencing/predicting
- Sentence combining
- Comprehending narrative texts
- Comprehending non-fiction texts
- WH questions
- Comparing and contrasting
- Storytelling
We’re talking over 100 pages of weather themed goodness, with gorgeous photos, helpful icons, and systematic instructional materials.
Other SLPs absolutely LOVE my weather themed pack. Here is some feedback I’ve received:
“I cannot get enough of Shannon’s themed language units. And weather has been a long time request of mine! SO, SO functional and easy to talk about. I adore the mix of activities. Thanks again!!”
— Colleen T.
“I like themes that any student can relate to and weather of course is one of those. Speechy Musings resources are excellent and this theme based units is no exception. Great for groups with mixed language goals and easily used for a wide range of abilities and target goals–this unit makes planning so much easier. Visuals are clear and easy to understand along with helpful graphic organizers. As always this theme is chock full of instructional activities. I always feel like I am getting my money’s worth when I buy Speechy Musings products.”
— Marti F.
“My students really love Shannon’s themed units, and living in a climate where we have distinctly different seasons they are all interested in the topic of weather. I love the way language concepts are woven into short essays, paragraphs, vocabulary sheets and sentence activities. The topic-based approach mirrors the way materials are presented in classrooms and has really helped with generalization of skills outside the speech room!”
— Mary Anne R.
Have fun in your therapy sessions and get the work done!
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