Let’s dive into the ocean to discover this delightful jellyfish books for preschoolers and early primary school children. Scroll down for a little insight into this picture book by Julia Seal and speech and language targets.

Picture Book Review

An adventurous jellyfish, Luna, enjoys sharing her travel stories with her friends. On her recent journey, she has seen that things are changing. When she returns, her friends have disappeared. How will she help them?

‘Bloom’ is one of those picture books that touches on the themes of climate change for kids as well as coming together as a community. It shares a powerful message that we all have a part to play in protecting our oceans.

If your little one loves picture books about the sea or you’re looking for jellyfish books for preschoolers, this book is a great addition to your bookshelf!

Picture Books Themes

• Sea animals
• Global warming and environmental change
• Friendships and community

Speech and Language Targets

Explore some speech and language targets that you can embed into your story time with your preschooler at home. Meet your child on their level and focus on modelling 1-2 targets at a time.

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Vocabulary and Concepts

This jellyfish books for preschoolers is great for helping your preschooler’s speech and language development. You can name and talk about:

• Sea animals: jellyfish, fish, shark, turtle, manta rays, seahorses, crabs, octopus
• Concepts: float, warmer, friendship, change, full, balanced, belong
• Places: ocean, coral reef, beaches, power stations
• Descriptive words: colourful, helpful, cluttered, huge, fabulous, unusual, bright
• Action words: play, roam, listen, notice, return, ask, lost, spread, reach, brush, camouflage, gaze, swimming, block, overturn, save

Speech Therapy Activity Ideas

After you’ve looked through ‘Bloom’ together, you can engage with sorting activities with your preschooler, like finding and talking about:

• Things that belong and do not belong in the sea
• Animals that live in the sea and animals that live on land
• Things that sink and float

Describing

The colourful illustrations in ‘Bloom’ are fantastic for helping your preschooler’s describing skills. Describing sea animals is a lot of fun, particularly if you pair it with other speech therapy activity ideas like making a sensory jar with floating jellyfish.

You can describe sea animals by:

• Their colour
• Their size and shape
• Their body parts
• Where they live
• What they eat
• Their special features
• An interesting fact

For example, Luna the jellyfish has long pink tentacles that sting, a smooth body and a mouth in the middle of her body. She lives in the ocean. Here’s an interesting fact about jellyfish, some can glow in the dark!

Grammar Structures

• Regular past tense (e.g., listened, noticed, returned)
• Irregular past tense (e.g., gone, went, lost)
• Present -ing tense (e.g., carrying, warming)
• Regular plurals (e.g., friends, armbands, nets)
• Pronouns (e.g., my, me, she, her, their, they)
• Preposition phrases (e.g., crawled out, in the distance)
• Compound sentences with connecting words (e.g., and, but, or)
• Complex sentences with the connecting words (e.g., when, if)

Higher Level Language Skills

‘Bloom’ is one of those jellyfish books for preschoolers that creates opportunities for you to model language around recalling, predicting and justifying information. For example, you can answer questions like:

Recalling 

• What happened at the beginning of the story?
• What did the jellyfish do first to help their friend

Predicting

• What might happen if there are too many jellyfish in the ocean?
• What could we do to help the jellyfish?
• How are the manta rays feeling? What might happen next?

Justifying and Explaining 

• How did all the plastic bottles and flip-flops get into the ocean?
• Why did the quiet ‘jellyfish’ not say anything to Luna?
• Why did Hermit say “The ocean is in trouble”?

Climate Change for Kids

‘Bloom’ also introduces your preschooler to concepts and vocabulary around climate change for kids. These concepts may not all be explicitly stated but the story and illustrations show changes that are happening in the ocean. You can use the story and pictures to introduce climate change at your child’s level whether it’s talking about keeping our beaches and oceans clean or sharing a simple explanation for these environmental changes.

Gestalt Language Processing

If your child is a gestalt language processor (i.e., learns language in chunks or scripts) and loves jellyfish books for preschoolers, use the illustrations to make comments and model mitigable gestalts naturally.

Here are some examples of mitigable gestalts that you can include in your story time. They are not a ‘one size fits all’ as gestalts should be chosen based on your child’s interests and what is meaningful for them.

• It’s time for a story
• It’s messy
• There’s so many jellyfish
• Oh no, where’d they go?
• It’s a [sea animal]
• Let’s help them

Speech Sounds

• w – water, waves, wanted, wonder, what, will, warming, weighed
• s – sea, sand, something, saw, seabed, suddenly, silent, save
• k – castles, come, colourful, camouflaged, carrying, can’t
• h – help, huge, heart, hermit, here, hear, her, hundreds
• f – full, fish, fabulous, find
• sh – shark, she, shell
• j – jellyfish, jet, just, jumped, joy
• ch – chase, changing
• r – reef, rhythm, returned, reached, rustle, ripped
• l – lately, Luna, loved, look, lost, long, loud, little
• cluster sounds – swimming, stories, skis, flavour, floated, friends, bloom, bright, quiet, question, cluttered, crawled

Story Elements

Another speech and language skill you can talk about is finding all the story elements. ‘Bloom’ includes:

• Character (who): Luna and her friends
• Setting (where): The ocean and coral reefs
• Motive (wants): Keeping balance in the ocean
• Problem (what happened): Luna’s friends are disappearing
• Solution (how do they fix it): All the jellyfish come together to help
• Main message: to help save our oceans
• Feelings: Although emotion words are not used within the text, feelings can be spoken about using the pictures and the story

Book details: Sunbird books
ISBN: 13-978-1503764958

Other Jellyfish Books for Preschoolers

Does your preschooler love jellyfish? Here are some other jellyfish books for preschoolers that they’ll enjoy:

• I am Jellyfish by Ruth Paul
• Jellyfish Feels Jealous by Katie Woolley
• The Search for the Giant Arctic Jellyfish by Chloe Savage
• Jessie the Jellyfish by Laurie Newman

A Few More Picture Book Recommendations