Episode Description: Inside Bingo’s dream, Bingo and Floppy have an intergalactic adventure, while the rest of her sleep-deprived family try to navigate Bingo’s non-stop night-time bedhopping.
ACTIVITIES:
- It’s time to take an adventure through space! First you’ll need some planets. You could simply use balls or balloons as stand-ins and have your kids travel via rocket ship or simply bounce through the solar system. Or you could make your own!
- Cut some out of cardboard and wrap them in wool
- Make marbled paper planets
- Craft these papier mache ones.
- If you’ve got the outdoor space (no pun intended), you can chalk out a map of the solar system. This post has a great tutorial for how to measure it to scale which is a fun hands-on way to incorporate some maths.
- There are so many astronaut videos on YouTube. My kids particularly love videos of astronauts demonstrating basic tasks done in zero gravity. The channel VideoFromSpace has some great clips like:
- Astronaut Karen washing her hair
- Astronaut Chris brushing his teeth
- And of course they will howl with laughter to hear Astronaut Samantha explain how toilets work in space
After you’ve watched a few videos you can have them think about another basic task like washing your hands and how one might do it in space. What inventions can they come up with to aid the process?
- There are lots of ways to teach your kids about constellations. You could make these fun constellation viewers out of toilet rolls, print out some constellation sewing cards or re-create them out of rocks and sidewalk chalk. But the most delicious is definitely making marshmallow constellation models. (Bonus fine motor skills!)
- Sleepytime wouldn’t be complete without some bedtime stories of course. A perfect choice would be “Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth” by Oliver Jeffers. You’ll want to snuggle up in bed for this one.
