What Would You Do – Nighttime Edition (Group)
All Ages
In this simple yet fun group time activity, tell kids to imagine each of the following scenarios, and then ask them what they would do if this actually happened.

• You were allowed to stay up all night and do whatever you wanted
• There was a friendly monster who lived in your closet
• You suddenly became nocturnal, sleeping during the day and awaking during the night.
• You could step into your dreams
• You were sleepwalking and woke up to find yourself in the middle of the supermarket covered in peanut butter and honey.
• Your bed was a magic carpet that came alive at night and could take you places.
• You woke up one night to find a spooky owl sitting at your feet and staring at you.

Curious Random Thoughts – Night Edition (All Ages)
Sit down with your kids and act like you’re daydreaming, swaying back and forth with your hand on your chin while staring dreamily off into the distance. Or stretch out on the floor and lay down, and have the kids in your class do the same. Then hit them with the following random thoughts, starting each sentence with “I wonder….” and then having a brief discussion about each one.

• What really happens after I go to bed
• What’s the strangest dream anyone has ever had
• What all the nocturnal creatures are doing while I’m sleeping
• What my brain is thinking when it’s dreaming and thinking without me
• Why I have recurring dreams where I’m a baby marshmallow being squeezed and melted between chocolate
• What I say when I talk in my sleep
• What’s the furthest anyone has ever walked in their sleep
• Why real life is never as cool as my dreams

After you’ve exhausted your list of random thoughts, you might ask the kids if they have any random thoughts of their own, and if so, to share them with the class. It’s an activity your kids are sure to love!

The Purpose of Sleep (All Ages)
Everyone sleeps. In fact, we spend around a third of our lives unconscious. But do kids know why we sleep? From a child’s perspective, sleep is little more than a dreaded nuisance that robs them of consciousness. So pose this question to your class and get their thoughts. Then have a discussion to talk about the importance of sleep:

1. Sleep allows the body to repair cells and perform important maintenance functions. Think of your body like a car: You couldn’t drive it around the clock every minute without checking the oil or performing maintenance on the engine or it would quickly break down. You also can’t try to repair a car while driving it at the same time. Sleep allows our body time to rest so it can repair itself, healing and recovering from all the day’s activity.

2. Sleep is especially important for the brain. It allows your brain to consolidate all your experiences into long-term memory, organizing all the new information you’ve learned. New neural pathways are formed and new cells are born.

3. You do almost all of your growing during sleep. So if you didn’t sleep, you wouldn’t grow, and you might still be 18 inches tall!

Thus sleep is important for both body and mind. You feel better, think better and behave better when well rested.

What happens if we don’t get enough sleep? Pose this question to your class and get their responses, then discuss some of these scientific consequences of a lack of sleep:

• Your brain becomes foggy
• It’s harder to learn and remember things
• You’re more likely to get sick
• Motor function declines, making it harder to perform. Athletes know the importance of a good night’s sleep!
• You’re more prone to make errors in judgment
• You have a harder time paying attention
• You’re more apt to misbehave or become irrationally emotional
• You experience a rise in stress hormones
• Your mental health declines
• You become more likely to be obese
• People are prone to driving mistakes, making sleep driving as dangerous as drunk driving

If sleep deprivation persists over long periods of time, your brain shrinks and you become brain damaged!

Dreams & Nightmares (All Ages)
Ask kids if they can recall any dreams or nightmares they’ve had in the past that they’re willing to share with the class. It can make for a fun and lively discussion. If you’d like, you can have the other kids act as ‘dream interpreters’ afterward, offering suggestions for all the weird, whacky, or realistic things a dream might mean.

What s A Dream? (All Ages)
Dreams can be strange. You might dream that you’re being chased by a giant tomato, only to stumble upon your grandma who offers you cookies and milk and asks how school is going, before turning into a giant doughnut. So what, exactly, is a dream? Pose this question to your class and get their thoughts about what a dream is and where they come from.

Here’s a crash course in the origin of dreams, and why they’re so strange: When you dream, your brain is busy consolidating the day’s new knowledge within your web of pre-existing thoughts and memories. Dreams are thus a mixture of all types of random input: things you did that day, memories from the past that might somehow connect with these thoughts, and whatever emotions or subconscious fears might be dredged up as your brain fires off these different circuits.

For a fun extension to this activity to do with older age groups, give your kids a made-up dream: I was buying fruit at the grocery store when I realized I didn’t have any pants on, before a plane crashed through the roof and the pilot asked, ‘Would you like fries with that?”), and have them explain the possible sources of the content for that dream based on A) the day’s experiences; B) Past memories; or C) Buried fears or emotions.

Nocturnal Animals (All Ages)
Some creatures are nocturnal, meaning they sleep during the day and become active throughout the night. Ask kids if they know of any nocturnal creatures, writing the name of each one down on your board. Here is a partial list in case you get stumped:

• Skunk
• Bat
• Owl
• Sloth
• Raccoon
• Cockroach
• Fox
• Coyote
• Opossum
• Pangolin
• Ocelot (a type of cat)
• Many types of spiders.

Now ask why they suppose each of these creatures prefers to come out at night instead of during the day. What benefits might there be to being nocturnal?