Sleep

Last night, according to my Oura ring, I got four hours of sleep, and just 4 minutes of REM sleep, and so I was looking up "Sleep" on WebMD. Here's what they say under How Much Sleep Do I Need?. I think it is fascinating!

The amount of sleep a person needs depends on many things, including their age. In general:

Infants (ages 0-3 months) need 14-17 hours a day.

Infants (ages 4-11 months) need 12-15 hours a day

Toddlers (ages 1-2 years) need about 11-14 hours a day.

Preschool children (ages 3-5) need 10-13 hours a day.

School-age children (ages 6-13) need 9-11 hours a day.

Teenagers (ages 14-17) need about 8-10 hours each day.

Most adults need 7 to 9 hours, although some people may need as few as 6 hours or as many as 10 hours of sleep each day.

Older adults (ages 65 and older) need 7-8 hours of sleep each day.

Women in the first 3 months of pregnancy often need several more hours of sleep than usual.

Usually I don't have trouble with sleep; I just stayed up late working on the computer and then was too congested to rest well. But we do prioritize sleep in our family. When my children were preschool age, they always slept 12 hours at night and had a three hour rest/quiet time in the afternoon. Zac still sleeps a full 12 hours a night but he doesn't fall asleep during his rest time anymore. This time of year when it gets dark early he goes to bed at 6:30 pm.

Waldorf is the only pedagogy that I know of that includes sleep as a specific tool in the method. You do your lesson on day 1 via storytelling and hands-on or artistic exploration. On day 2 the children recall the content of yesterday's lesson orally, you do more hands-on or artistic exploration as needed, and then they create their main lesson book text and illustration summarizing what they learned. You sleep on it, half forget it, recall it, and then take notes on the lesson! This helps move information from short term into long term memory. It also gives the teacher useful assessment opportunities. If someone can't summarize yesterday's lesson, they didn't understand it and more work with that concept is needed. Some people do a 2 day rhythm, so after the MLB time they would immediately tell the new story. Some people do a 3 day rhythm and would have writing in the MLB be the end of the lesson time for that day, and tell a new story the next day.

Audrey McAllen wrote an entire book on sleep. It is called Sleep: An Unobserved Element in Education.

It is very Waldorf-y, so if you are looking for an introduction to anthroposophy, it would be a good book to start with!

Description from the Online Waldorf Library:

Children take their daytime experience over into their sleep life. In Sleep, Audrey E. McAllen writes explicitly about the importance of sleep in education, including lively descriptions of her experiences working with children. Very valuable are the Moral Color Exercises, a series of paintings she developed from indications by Rudolf Steiner and Hilde Boos-Hamburger, exercises very much appreciated by children from sixth grade on. —Joep Eikenboom, Waldorf Teacher and Extra Lesson Teacher, Dordrecht, The Netherlands

Contents:
Sleep and Dream
The Threefold Experience of Sleep
Not All My Own Work
The Human Being as a Spatial Being:
The Earth as an Image of the Human Being
The Earth as a Living, Breathing Being
The Child's Relationship to Sleep
Sleep and Reincarnation
The Moral Color Exercises
An Account of Support Lessons with Three Students

Audrey McAllen is an English Waldorf teacher who has spent a lifetime developing ways to help children who have learning difficulties. She based her work on study of Rudolf Steiner's indications regarding spiritual aspects of human development and on her observation of and practical work with many children.

Personally, I would describe her as a straight-up special education genius. ALL of her books are wonderful!

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