Chiral symmetry is used as the guiding principle to derive hard thermal loop effects in chiral perturbation theory. This is done by using a chiral invariant background field method for the non-linear sigma model and the Wess-Zumino-Witten lagrangian, with and without external vector and axial vector sources. It is then shown that the n-point hard thermal loop is the leading thermal correction for the Green function of n point vector soft quark currents.

15 pages, Revtex, references added, typos corrected, final version to appear in Phys. Rev. D