New Years Activities for Middle and High School Students!
Updated 12/24
Looking for some new years activities to use during speech therapy with older students? Upon returning to school after a break, is the perfect time to have students reflect upon challenges and accomplishments of the prior year. Since many of them may have watched or participated in a new year’s celebration, it will seem relevant to them. It’s hard for some of our students, especially those with autism, to reflect and self-evaluate their own performance and they benefit from being able to do so in a supported and guided setting.
The new year also offers opportunities to work on inferencing and predicting, two important skills that our speech therapy students may find difficult. Bonus: these skills will help students with reading comprehension too. Here are a few ideas for new year’s activities with your speech therapy or general education, older students.
Hold your own Ball Drop with Balloons!
Do your own version of the new year’s eve ball drop on times square in New York city. This video, “the history of the time’s square ball” is 4:50 long and provides a history of the ball dropping tradition in time’s square. If you have students with reading comprehension or wh questions goals, this video provides good informational content.
Have a times square type “balloon drop” while you work on making predictions! Fill the balloons with various substances such as rice, marbles, cotton balls. Then, blow them up and tie them. Have students predict which balloon will fall to the ground first, second and third. Have students stand in a line and you can do a count off to the balloon drop. When you reach “one,” say “happy new year,” and students drop their balloons. Compare everyone’s prediction to the actual performance of the balloons!
New Years Predictions for Self and Others!
Tell student that they just used available knowlege about the weight of the items in the balloon to make a prediction. Now, they are going to use their available knowledge about themselves and others to make predictions for the new year! In my subscriber’s library (free when you join my newsletter), I give you options that will work for both 1:1 sessions and classroom settings. You can use the balloon drop alongside this activity or as a stand alone!
New Years Eve Wishing Wall
Have you heard of the NYE Wishing Wall? in New York City? We visited years ago and it’s a fun opportunity to have your wish be dropped as confetti on New Year’s Eve in times square in NYC. If you are at the times square plaza in person, you can add your wish, but they also have a way to add them online! If you get your wish in after the deadline, it will be saved for the following year. This could be a fun distance learning activity to kick off the new year for your older students.
Vocabulary related to the New Year!
Some speech therapy students who are used to hearing about resolutions, may need to be taught the subtle differences between these three words: resolution, prediction and wish. Have them look up the definitions, find synonyms and antonyms, use them in sentences, etc. If you are looking for holiday vocabulary ideas, check out my blog post on holiday vocabulary!
Growth Mindset
The start of a new year is an appropriate time to introduce the concept of growth mindset to your older students. Even if they’ve been taught the growth mindset basics, they may not be aware of how it applies to learning! I have two products that teach growth mindset for learning: a set of BOOM cards and a print/no print version in EASEL. Both cover growth and fixed mindset, learning strategies, self talk and more!
Join My Newlsetter!
Last of all, if you haven’t already subscribed to my newletter, now is a good time! I send out notices of sales, new products, therapy ideas and subscriber freebies.
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