Dreams and catchers

Annoyingly, when I was looking online for interesting ways to teach about dreams to kids, my searches kept returning hits for "Helping kids follow their dreams" and "Kids can dream big!" and so forth. No, no, no, I don't want my kids to FOLLOW their dreams! Just to learn about them. :)  I also got a really horrible book at the library that was outlined as follows: psychic dreams . . . are they real? . . . anecdote, anecdote . . . total lack of meaningful information . . . YOU DECIDE! If there is one way I can think of to totally freak my kids out and make them never want to face the world again, it is to tell them that their (sometimes weird, often disturbing) dreams are predicting the future. Honestly! I hate psuedo-science (not that I am discounting the idea that dreams may be predictive, but anecdotal "evidence" is never going to tell the whole story, and I resent them trying to pass it off as scientific).

Anyway, I had to resort to looking up sleep and dreams in my old psychology and child development textbooks and then making my own presentation from those. I also had this really good and useful book--very basic, but good. My kids loved learning about the stages of sleep and the (theorized) reasons for dreams---they found it fascinating---as well they should, since it IS fascinating! (Read this, for example!)

I tried so hard to think of an activity to go with this discussion, and finally settled on making dream catchers, since we had discussed several ideas, including legends, about why we dream/where dreams come from/etc. I don't love making crafts we aren't going to USE or that don't teach something interesting---but the kids ended up liking these and hanging them in their rooms with somewhat hopeful amusement ("They don't really catch the bad dreams . . . but they might!"). So I thought it was a good craft after all. It's fairly obvious how to make it (paper plate + strung yarn) but I did look at instructions here.