Bedtime Bliss: 5 Fun and Calming Activities to Help Your Kids Wind Down for the Night
Evenings can be a challenging time. Here are 5 ideas for activities that will help your child relax and prepare for sleep.
Quiet house tour
Take a walk around the entire house with your child. Go into every room. Your task is to choose one thing in each room that reminds each of you of sleep. Additionally, while walking from room to room, do not talk to each other and try to keep quiet and walk on tiptoes so as not to scare away Mrs. Night.
Forest in a bottle
Pour some water into a transparent bottle and then put in a blade of grass, a stick, a flower, a stone, and other treasures collected during a walk. Look at the objects in the water together with your child – some will float, others will sink. See what happens when you shake the bottle.
Drawing in the dark
Turn off the lights and start drawing shapes and symbols on the wall with a small flashlight. You can also use colored lasers for cats (but be careful with your eyes!). Alternatively, you can do shadow puppet theater with the flashlight.
Teddy bear play
The parent pretends to become a teddy bear. The child’s task is to lead the teddy bear to the room and put it to sleep. This often leads children to sing favorite lullabies, tell poems, hug – it promotes calmness and builds a friendly atmosphere before sleep. Then the parent steps out of the teddy bear role and suggests that now the child be the teddy bear.
Dreamy animal play
This game involves one person saying the name of an animal (or also describing what the animal usually does during the day, how it behaves, etc.) and the other person’s task is to come up with what this animal might dream about today. Remember to switch roles!
The 6th Bonus Activity: Reading “Dreamweaves” Together
In this book, you’ll find as many as 13 poems for children aged 2-9 years old. Each poem employs a different relaxation technique to help your child unwind and gently drift off to sleep!
Pin it for later!
