Book Love: Book of Sleep

I have loved A Book of Sleep by Il Sung Na for a long time now, as a bedtime story for my son. But I decided to give it a try with my preschool class since we had been talking about what people and animals do at night. It worked really well for this topic.

This book is really simple and explores the way that different animals sleep (or don't sleep, in the case of the owl) at night. I love the whimsical illustrations, and the patterned rhythm of the text.

Read-Aloud Tips:
We decided to read this book in the dark and pretend it was night. The kids liked the change of gathering around close together to see the pages by the light of a lantern.

 Each animal in this book does something unique when they sleep. We took our time with each one to think about what it might be like to sleep that way, and even acted out some of the ideas, like sleeping with one eye open or standing up.

There is also a little owl on each page, and so naturally they were eager to find it.

Nocturnal Animals Connection:
We used this book as a springboard to talk about other nocturnal animals that stay awake during the night, and sleep during the day. The kids took turns looking through this set of nonfiction books about different nocturnal animals, still to the light of the lantern of course.