Create an Easy Bedtime Routine, Koala Moon

Links for this Episode:

• Podcast Consultation Form
• Koala Moon Website
• Koala Moon Instagram
• Koala Moon on YouTube
• Koala Moon on Apple Podcasts
• Koala Moon on Spotify  
• Reach x Koko Sleep: Hector & Sunny In Space Episode 

The Koala Moon team describes the podcast like this. Original bedtime stories and meditations for children, designed to make bedtimes a dream. These magical sleep meditations and short stories are delivered in a relaxed, audiobook style with calming sleep music. The length of each episode is about 30 minutes. 

Podcast Consultations 

I’ve been able to talk to some amazing podcasters about their shows while doing interviews for the friendly podcast guide. Along the way, I’ve learned so many tips and tricks on how to start a podcast from personal experience and from the hosts I’ve interviewed. I’ve talked to them about what made their launch successful and what made it more difficult. There are things that I for sure know what I would do differently if I could go back and launch my show again.

Now I want to share my knowledge with you. I’m offering podcast consults and I have a couple of spots open in the next month. If you need help nailing down your podcast idea, figuring out your niche, or any other podcast questions, I would love to work with you to make your show’s launch the best it can be.

If you’re interested in working with me, fill out the intake form in the show notes. I can’t wait to make a podcast plan that is tailored to you and your podcast, and we’ll make your launch as smooth and successful as possible.  

Creating Quality Kid Content

I am Abbe Opher and I’m from Koko Sleep, Bedtime Stories and Meditation Podcast. 

I’m British, as you can hear, and I live in Wales. We live in the countryside and I have two children. Sunny is my gorgeous dog who is featured in the podcast. We go on daily dog walks where we live. It’s really beautiful.

While I was a narrator for Koko Sleep and it’s a team effort, not me on my own. I had my own young children and went through that famous tumultuous time of having very little children. I wanted to raise them right and be busy with them during the day and read stories at night, while making sure they got enough sleep in between.

As a mom, I wondered why there weren’t more sleep stories for children. They didn’t have to be children’s stories, but stories that were beautifully crafted and really nicely presented with empathy. Also, stories with themes in them that children could relate to. Stories with big themes of kind having big feelings. I couldn’t understand why there wasn’t this thing out there in the world for kids. There’s an awful lot of kids’ content, but there isn’t necessarily what I would consider a good quality content that’s got integrity. That’s what I was very interested in trying to do.

From A Challenging to an Easy Bedtime 

I had a conversation with my lovely team at Sleepist. The app was in existence and it’s hugely popular, but we started the podcast. The podcast is very much in that niche of relaxing stories that children will enjoy, but also hopefully their wider family will also enjoy listening to. It can become a part of an easy bedtime routine. 

It’s taken all of us by a huge surprise, how loyal our listeners are. We started with a free podcast and now we also have a subscription, premium stream. The reviews have come in thick and  fast with 5,000 positive comments. It’s absolutely lovely reading what children have to say about the podcast and what their parents think about how much they enjoy listening together.

People share how bedtime has been flipped from a punishment to a reward because they can settle down and listen together. 

Create an Easy Bedtime Routine

Every single day you get to the point where it becomes bedtime and it’s always a point of tension. On the daily, it tends to be a kind of potential time for the wheels to fall off. My dream is essentially to produce something that will be really enjoyable and, good on every level. There is nothing sinister, dark, nothing that’s going to give the kids nightmares. There is a really beautiful story that’s going to be just long enough and read in a way that’s suitable enough to help them drift off to sleep.  

I think bedtime stories have this fantastic magic to them that they can shift you out of whatever state you were in into a new state. You can forget whatever happened during the day, or if there was a big flare up over tea or whatever. Once you’re in bed and you’ve got a story you can move into a completely lovely new place.  You’ll go to sleep and sleep really well and you’ll wake up refreshed and your next day is just going to be better.

Calm Characters

The vibe is very relaxing, soothing, and calm. I love story writing and we have great writers that have created some lovely characters. Sunny and Hector are two of our most popular characters and their two dogs, they’re best friends.

Sunny has my dog and Hector belongs to our CEO. They were both puppies at the same time.  These two dogs go off on all kinds of missions and have all sorts of adventures. They’re always having a bit of fun. It is lighthearted, funny, and sweet.

Connect with Koala Moon

We have a website as well as Instagram. We are also on YouTube and everywhere that podcasts can be found. All of the links are at the top of this blog post. 

Episodes to Listen To

I want to give a shout out to our wonderful story writers. We’ve got Susannah, Alicia, Gillian, Luke, and Jane. My current favorite is a collaboration with another podcast called Reach. It is a space story that features Hector and Sunny, our two lovely dogs. They are going on a journey to  an observatory to look at the star. The dogs fall asleep on the way there and they get immersed in this podcast that their owner’s listening to, which is the Reach podcast. It is all about space and traveling through the solar system. They go off on this amazing flight through space and they meet up with the two hosts of the other podcast in dog form.

Hector and Sunny have some great dialogue. We learn a lot about the different planets and then they come back down to earth and end up back in the car. Their owner takes them into the observatory and there’s an amazing imaginary mashup that happens. It’s got really lovely dialogue and is really interesting. A lot of kids love space and hearing about it.

Becoming Brave

Another really lovely one is called Isla and the Bravery Dragon. Isla is at school and she has a comfort toy with her because she’s very nervous about doing the school assembly.  Through doing several things and learning ways to relax herself and to her parents and the lovely things her parents say because she’s stopped feeling quite so nervous.  They’re doing a rehearsal of their assembly at school and she realizes that the boy next to her is really nervous.

She so sweetly gives him her bravery dragon. It isn’t really kind of spoken of explicitly, but the story is about the kindness of children. The story is about how they can be very sweet and we don’t celebrate it very often.

Alicia wrote that story and it had a moment that really choked me up when I was reading it. I thought that it was so sweet. The way that she conveyed it really stayed with me. It came from a request from a preschool teacher in New Zealand. The preschool teacher’s own daughter was called Isla, who had a little bravery dragon. She wrote in, said could you write a story about it? Alicia jumped in and came up with this brilliant story. A lot of our stories come from listeners.  

Listener Feedback Is Important 

KokoSleep has shown me that if you can keep the doors open for communication, you get back so much from people. Whether that’s from your listeners, from other podcasters, it’s a little bit like magic. We seem to get truckloads of lovely comments or suggestions or names for characters.  Kids send in pictures that they’ve drawn and it has such a real effect on our team. We really know that what we’re doing is serving people and it’s hitting the spot. Recently, we found out that the average podcast listener listens to our podcast 27 times a month. They are listening almost nightly. They are thinking about us and sending us stuff. We are taking that inspiration and doing something with it and then you get a response and it’s just lovely.

Perfect Age for Stories

I’d say 5 to 12 is the kind of perfect age range.  We’ve got some writers that tend to write younger for some stories. If you were to pass them through a reading age filter, it would say five or six years old. Then some of our stories definitely are more like 10 or 11 years old. The vocabulary and grammar are a bit more complicated. Some of the concepts are possibly a bit more complicated as well. It’s quite a broad range. We’ve had comments from older kids who say they listen because it kind of helps them to relax when they feel a bit younger.

One of my major reasons for wanting to do this for children was that as a child I listened to cassettes. I was listening to audio cassettes when I was a child. At night, I was reading, but then I had to turn my light out and then I was allowed to listen. I would always listen to the same ones from probably from about the age of 8 until I was about 14. It is something that I wanted to give that back, because I know how lovely that is, how comforting it is to have something to listen to all the time.