Getting ready for bed

Sensory integration

﻿Getting ready for bed when you are not tired is not easy. And it's also not very easy to try and go to bed and fall asleep when your body is still ready to move around. And in this lesson, we are going to look at what you can do when your body is really under responsive and needs a lot of movement before you can actually fall asleep. We as therapists have tried to think of the best way to continue to support children, young people and their families. We will be exploring topic areas that we regularly provide advice and support on across all ages and abilities. Each lesson will have ideas and activities that can be carried out at home or in school. This information is to be used alongside any specific strategies or resources which have been given by your child's school or therapist. If you have any questions or would like help tailoring this to your child's needs, then please contact your local therapy service. So in today's lesson, we're going to carry on looking at sleep and why it may be difficult for our bodies to fall asleep. So in this lesson, what you're going to need is you're going to need a blanket. So please pause the video here to collect all the things you need and then press play, and we will carry on. Okay. I'm just going to remind you that sometimes movement can be really scary and that could be when you have to lie on your bed and your feet are off of the floor, in really severe cases, that could make you feel scared. You can also maybe get dizzy easily, and that could be when you're in your bed and you're kind of lying around and you're rolling around in your bed, for some people, I know it sounds strange, but that could make them dizzy and they could feel a little bit disorientated. When you don't get dizzy and your body is really under responsive to movement, it could be that you find it hard to fall asleep because you want to still keep going. Your body wants to move. Your body doesn't like sitting still or lying still, and you want to move all the time. And then finally, being always on the go is very similar. So again, it's when you are under responsive to movement and your movement sensors don't process movement in an easy way, it may be that you carry on, you just find it really hard to be still and to then be calm and then fall asleep. So we're going to have a little look at what you can do at nighttime to help with this. So we're going to play a game, and you will need to play this game with your parent or your carer. What you're going to do is the hot-dog game. So we have played this in a previous lesson, but I'm going to remind you how to play this game. So you are going to lie down on the floor on your tummy. You're going to ask your parent or carer to have a blanket, and they're going to tuck it around you, so make it really nice and snug, make sure that your arms and your shoulders and your head is outside of the blanket, and now you're going to just lie down. If you want to, you can close your eyes and you can ask your parent or carer to add a topping, because you're pretending to be a hot dog and they can put some toppings on. So you can ask for slices of tomato, extra cheese, mayonnaise, ketchup, just what you want, and they will use pretend movements with their hands, very gently on your back, and it's a little bit like that massage story from a previous lesson as well. So you're going to use these different touch pressures, and then you can let them know how that feels for you. So try it out, and then when you're finished, press play and we'll carry on with the lesson. Okay, well done. I hope you feel a little bit more chilled after that game. Let's have a look if we can play another game. So this game is really, really good just before bedtime, and especially when your body still has a lot of energy for moving around. So what you can do is you can do different animal walks. So going upstairs, don't walk up the stairs, walk maybe like a big lion or like an elephant, and once you get to the top of the stairs to go to your bedroom, you may want to slither like a snake. Then you may want to get into your PJs, and instead of walking to the bathroom, you may want to do a different animal game. And in the same way, going back from the bathroom, back to your room, you can choose yet another animal walk, and this will really help your body to get rid of some of the energy. But especially if you end up with really thinking about the heavy, big animals, like a big elephant stomping slowly, so try and think of those big animals or a rhinoceros, or a massive big dinosaur, like Diplodocus, I think they were quite big and stompy when they were walking. When you do that, you can then go back to your bed, and hopefully by that time, your body would have released some of the energy and you will be ready to bed. But for today, we're just going to play this game. You're going to pretend that you're an animal and you're going to copy its walk, and it's up your parent or carer, or some of your other family members to have a guess at what animal you are. So take turns playing this game, have fun, and when you're finished, press play again. Well done! I hope you had fun learning about some games that you can play before bedtime that will help your movement sense to calm down.

Getting ready for bed

Getting ready for bed

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