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Dialogue
The child cannot fall asleep in the kindergarten. What should the teachers do?
Often you can hear kids saying “I don’t want to sleep at the kindergarten” or “I don’t feel sleepy during the day” – you can hear it even more when the little one grows a bit older. However, “CreaKids” teacher Kristīne Zvaigzne highlights, that the morning period in the kindergarten can be so busy and filled with activities, that the little ones simply need that little bit of rest.
Kristīne has observed, that often the children are even more tired than they think and if you find the right manner of speaking, the child who did not want to sleep ends up falling asleep anyways. More often than not the children putting up the biggest fight against sleeping are the ones that sleep the best and wake up with more energy for the next adventures that await them in the afternoon.
Here are some tips that Kristīne has tried out herself:
Afternoon nap – the time for rest
The nap time we call the “rest time” – that is the time when you need to rest and it doesn’t matter whether you do it with your eyes closed or open, the only rule is that you can’t bother anyone else who is trying to rest. With the children, we discuss how after such an active and busy part of the day everyone needs a bit of rest. And not only do you need to rest your body, but you should also allow your thoughts and brains rest so that in the afternoon you have even more energy left for playing and other activities.
Healthy lifestyle – you should also educate the little ones
We often talk about healthy lifestyle in a language that the children can also understand – a point we make sure to stress in that an important part of healthy lifestyle is getting some rest and getting enough hours of sleep (with the older children we also have looked at tables of how many hours should people of every age sleep and we have tried to calculate how many hours of sleep we get ourselves).
Ritual before rest
Before sleep the teachers read children a bedtime story, sometimes we listen to audiobooks (fairytales), and other times everyone has 10 minutes to look at/read their favorite books in their beds. We try to bring in a bit of variety in the going-to-bed process. Sometimes we also sit beside the kids who have a bit more of a difficult time falling asleep.
Adjusting the layout of the room
When you rearrange the room, make sure to think about the rest time as well – when you put up letters, numbers or material related t the topic you study at that point, make sure they are at the eye level of the kids, so when they are looking around before falling asleep they see this material and unconsciously learn.