Monthly Archives: May 2023

Mermaid For A Day – Interview with Juliet Jenson Author/Illustrator

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I’m kicking off a picture book author Interview series and I’m excited to start by sharing the picture book “Mermaid for a Day” by Juliet Jenson with all of you.

Disclosure: This blog does accept sponsored posts and may contain affiliate links (which means I make a percentage of the sale if you buy something).

First, can you tell me why parents and caregivers might want to pick your book?  Especially when there are so many mermaid books out there? 

Juliet: There are lots of wonderful mermaid books out there, but I wrote “Mermaid for a Day” half for kids and half for caregivers.  I wanted to write the kind of book that kids would want to have read to them again and again, while also writing the kind of book that parents would be eager to read to them.

What I really mean is I wanted to create a book that is fun, beautiful, adventurous and full of magic, so it’s exciting for kids.

And I wanted to make it short, easy to read aloud (it rhymes), and to let the pictures do most of the talking for the parents.  I know for my own kids, I love reading to them before bed, but some nights the books they want read to them are 50 pages long, with dense text, and I die inside a little.  Don’t get me wrong, I love those big books during the day, but before bed I want something fun, and also something short enough to keep their attention. (I’m usually reading to my boys ages 4 & 7 if that helps set the stage)

Can you briefly sum up what the story is about? 

Juliet: Sure.  It kicks off with a little girl saving a fish who grants her wish to become a mermaid, but only for a day.  She spends the rest of the book doing what I think we’d all want to do if we were mermaids as kids,  she swims with dolphins, plays dress up with other mermaid friends, builds seashell puzzles, paints with an octopus, plays seaweed hide and seek, explores a sunken pirate ship and more.

Each page is a mini activity that kids can hopefully relate to, with a mermaid twist to it.

What inspired you to write this particular book?

Juliet: Well my daughter had just been born, and I’d been looking for a creative project and this just kind of came to me.  Kind of Animorphs for 5 year olds. I typed out the first few drafts of the story while doing middle of the night feedings, and it was just so fun I couldn’t stop.

Do you have a favorite page?

Juliet: I honestly love so many of them, but I think my top two might be the first page of the book, where she’s throwing the fish back into the sea, or the seaweed hide and seek page. I just feel like visually, they were the two the came out so much better than I dared to hope.


Thank you so much.  One last question, if you could have any super power, what would it be, and why?

Juliet: I would definitely love either super speed or the ability to stop time for everyone except me.  🙂 I have so many ideas and things I want to do, but there never seems to be enough time to do even a fraction of them.

***

Thank you so much for sharing this, and if any readers are interested, “Mermaid For A Day” is on sale now on Amazon with both a paperback and ebook, and soon it will be available through all major book retailers.

Buy “Mermaid For A Day” From Amazon

5 Easy, Engaging and Affordable Letter E Activities

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5 Easy, engaging and affordable Letter E activities for your preschooler that can be done with only a few minutes of prep and will (hopefully) engage your child for far longer. From a fun craft to a game that encourages exercise, these activities are designed to make learning at home a breeze. So let’s dive in and discover fun letter E activities you can use to engage with your child.

E is for Elephant Eating Game

A fun activity to when learning the letter E is the Elephant Eating Game. This game is perfect for getting your child up and moving, while still learning the letter E. 

To prep you will need a cardboard box, to print (or draw) an elephant image, an empty cardboard tube (paper towel tubes work great) and some letter “E” Cutouts. (Printable E and Elephants Below)

Make your elephant by pasting (or drawing) the elephant image to/on your box and cutting out around its nose.  Then add the cardboard tube to be the elephant nose.  I used hot glue because it seemed fast and easy to me.  I’m sure tape would work great too.

Scatter your letter E cutouts around the room and let your preschooler gather them up and feed them to the elephant down its long nose. My son loved this game especially because he got to crumple up the “E’s” so they would fit down the nose.

After we fed the all the Letter E’s to the elephant my son wasn’t ready to be done, and thought it was just as fun to feed the elephant the other letters as well, then try to guess which of the crumpled papers were “E’s” and feed and refeed the elephant.  Honestly, for us, this was a 10/10 engagement, and I was ready to move on way before my son was, which is always a win in my book.

Bonus points if you use both capital and lowercase letter E’s, and different fonts to help with letter recognition.

(Click the images below to download and print if wanted)

 

E is for Exercise

Physical activity is great for children’s development, and it’s so easy to make fun at this age. 

You can do any number of activities, but for us… Cosmic Kids Yoga is always a win, and in the name of Letter E, we watched her Easter Yoga video for our Exercise movement (I think there is also an Earth Day one, if you want to keep an E theme, but honestly all exercise is a win).    

Or you can find fun way to incorporate letter E activities by doing an exercise routine that involves E-related movements. For example, you can have your child do jumping “Elephant” jacks or “Eagle” squats which is pretty much the normal movement while incorporating a little bit of animal fun. 

 

E is for Envelope Exploration

This one takes a small amount of prep (less than 5 minutes) but was also a good time. Below I’ve got some printables that include letter E things and non-letter E things that you’re welcome to use for this. 

Print out and cut out the letter E, and non letter E pictures and put each one in their own envelope, then hide those envelopes around your house.

Have your child go “Exploring” looking for the envelopes, then have them open what they find and decide if the picture inside starts with letter E or not.  If you’ve got a younger child, you can also just do the Letter E things and practice really annunciating the “E” sounding start to each item as you have them say it with you.

After we had all the envelopes collected we also ended up spreading them out and playing a pumped up memory game, where we tried to guess which envelopes had letter E things in them, and if we guessed right we got to keep that envelope/picture.

E is for Earth!

Another fun activity that adapts really well to some outside play is making Earth Day style crafts. These are great for any time of the year, as it’s always worthwhile to be conscientious of our planet.  This craft is a great way to celebrate our planet, and also provides an opportunity to teach your child about the environment and the importance of taking care of it. 

Encouraging your child to be environmentally conscious from a young age is important for their future, and taking about caring for our Earth is the perfect way to start. 

For this I started by checking out our recycle bin to see if we had anything that was blue in it that we could use (we did) if you don’t blue paper, or tissue paper would also work great for this.

Then I handed my son a pair of craft scissors and a little box and we went for a walk and gathered up some nature treasures, mostly in the form of grass and leaves.

After our walk we came back and cut up our blue recycling into little bits and trimmed some of our nature treasures, and grabbed some glue.

I printed out an earth for us (free printable below) and we glued our blue stuff in the ocean areas, and our green stuff on the land areas, making what I thought was a fun a pretty unique craft.

E is for Egg-Experimenting

We did this right around Easter, and you actually don’t need eggs at all, but we had so many laying around and it was E themed so… it happened.  Looking at this post some time of the year that’s not April? No worries, I think it would have worked just as well with only the cupcake tin.

I put some baking soda in our plastic eggs (or in a muffin tin) then added a few different colored drops of food coloring, then added more baking soda over the top so the colors were hidden.

Then I gave my sons a bunch of vinegar in our pipettes and them them squirt it in our different cups until the erupted and they could see the different colors.  This one was so engaging and fun that my ten year old, who is reaching the too cool for these kinds of things stage, couldn’t resist getting in a playing a bit with this one.

There you have it, 5 letter E activities that you can do more or less on a whim, and that we had a great time with.  If you’ve used them or have ideas I’d love to know how it went if you wanted to drop me a comment below.

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List of 30 Letter X Foods Ideas (Kid Friendly) & X Foods Charcuterie Board Idea

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Here’s the deal, Letter X foods have had me stumped for a good long time.  I want an easy, kid friendly list and Xanthan gum just wasn’t cutting it for me. I looked up a few other foods like Xtra Gum, and a Xtreme type foods, but it was still a painfully short list. 

From there I branched out, and if you look at different languages you can get a few more foods that start with X, especially the chinese names of things.  So I created a much longer list that includes foods in different languages, but having taught Joy School for a few of my kids and worked with toddlers and preschoolers learning there letters all I could think was that throwing foods in different languages at them really wasn’t going to be super fun or helpful for learning a new letter.

After a lot of thought (like 6 months, lol) I realized that just as good as foods starting with Letter X, my kids would be equally excited about just eating Letter X shaped foods… which, as it happens, are a lot easier to come by (at least for me) so for this Charcuterie Board I ditched the foods that started with Letter X, and instead my kids and I had a great time making Letter X’s out of foods (which as it happens was a really fun activity – we used lots of strait foods and held them together with either Twizzlers Pull and Peel licorice, or small strips and globs of Fruit By The Foot – My kids would 100% recommend this)

In either case I have two list below, a list of strait foods that I think can be made into Letter X’s and a list of food that actually start with Letter X, most of them in languages other than English.

I’m sure I missed a few Letter X foods, or straight foods that could be converted into X’s, and if you notice that I have please comment below and I’ll be sure to get them added 🙂

 

I’ve got the list of foods that can be shaped into a Letter X first, then the full list of Letter X Food, and after that I’ve sorted the foods into types and if you want you can just pop to those sections.  The types are:

• Fruits and Vegetables that Start with X

• Sweets and Treats that Start with X

• Meals and Snacks That Start with X

• Letter X Brand Named Foods

Ideas of Foods that Can Be Shaped Into a Letter X

  1. Airhead Xtremes Rainbow Belt Candies
  2. Artisan Bread (I found some with an X shape in the top)
  3. Asparagus
  4. Bamboo Shoots
  5. Bread Sticks
  6. Carrot Sticks
  7. Celery 
  8. Cheese Sticks
  9. Churos
  10. Cucumbers 
  11. Fruit Roll-Ups
  12. Green Beans
  13. Honey Sticks
  14. Ladyfinger Cookies
  15. Lora Doone Cookies (have a bit of an x shape imprinted on the top) 
  16. Lucky Charm Cereal Pieces (Some of them are X shaped)
  17. Nerds Ropes
  18. Pasta Noodles
  19. Pickels
  20. Pirouette Cookies
  21. Pocky Sticks
  22. Pretzels
  23. Slim Jims
  24. Soybeans (Edamame)
  25. String Cheese
  26. Sugar Snap Peas
  27. Sweet and Sour Ropes
  28. Taquitos
  29. Twizzlers 
  30. Twizzlers Pull and Peel 
  31. Wafter Cookies
  32. X shaped Alphabet Cookies
  33. Zucchini Strips

List of 30 Foods That Start With Letter X

  1. Airhead Xtremes Rainbow Belt Candys: Colorful and tangy candy strips
  2. Xacuti masala: Indian delicacy made with marinated meat or fish mixed with spices
  3. Xalwa a somali: Cornflour paste dish from Somalia
  4. Xanthan gum: Food thickener with multiple uses
  5. Xanthren: Herbal plant
  6. Xavier soup: Classic Italian soup
  7. Xavier steak: American dish featuring steak
  8. Xerem de Fiesta: Cape Verdean dish
  9. Xia: Chinese shrimp
  10. Xiang Cai: Chinese for coriander
  11. Xiangcaojing: Chinese for vanilla
  12. Xiangchang: Chinese for sausage
  13. Xiangjiao: Chinese for banana
  14. Xian hamburger: Chinese style hamburger
  15. Xianrou: Chinese for bacon
  16. Xiaodianxin: Chinese for cookies
  17. Xiaonijurou: Chinese for veal
  18. Xi gua: Chinese for watermelon
  19. Xihongshi: Chinese for tomato
  20. Xi mi fen: Chinese for tapioca flour
  21. Xinag jun: Chinese for black dried mushroom
  22. Xingzi: Chinese for apricot
  23. Xiphios: Greek for swordfish
  24. Xocolatl: Ancient Aztec word for chocolate
  25. Xom Tum: Hot and spicy Thai dish
  26. XO sauce: Hong Kong style sauce
  27. Xouba: Small sardine like fish
  28. Xtra: Brand of gum
  29. Xtreme Candy: Extra intense candy
  30. Xtreme hot sauce: Extremely spicy hot sauce
  31. Xylitol: Sugar substitute and sweetener

 

Fruits, Nuts and Vegetables That Start With Letter X

  1. Xanthren (herb)
  2. Xiangjiao – Chinese for banana
  3. Xi gua – Chinese for watermelon
  4. Xihongshi – Chinese for tomato
  5. Xinag jun – Chinese for black dried mushroom
  6. Xingzi – Chinese for apricot

Sweets And Treats That Start With Letter X

  1. Airhead Xtremes Rainbow Belt Candys
  2. Xiaodianxin – Chinese for cookies
  3. Xocolatl – Ancient Aztec for chocolate
  4. Xtra – (brand of gum)
  5. Xtreme Candy

Meals and Snacks that Start with Letter X

  1. Xacuti masala (Indian delicacy prepared with marinated meat or fish and mixed spices)
  2. Xavier soup (classic Italian soup)
  3. Xavier steak (American steak dish)
  4. Xerem de Fiesta (dish from Cape Verde, Africa)
  5. Xia – Chinese shrimp
  6. Xiangchang – Chinese for sausage
  7. Xian hamburger
  8. Xianrou – Chinese for bacon
  9. Xiaonijurou – Chinese for veal
  10. Xiphios – Greek for swordfish
  11. Xom Tum – Hot and spicy Thai dish

Food Brand Names That Start With Letter X

  1. Airhead Xtremes Rainbow Belt Candys
  2. XO sauce
  3. Xtra – (brand of gum)
  4. Xtreme Candy
  5. Xtreme hot sauce

Can you think of any other letter “X” foods?  If so please comment and let me know, I’d love to get them added to the list.

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