Today I am so excited to share a really fun food art project I came up with inspired by the website Animal Jam. The folks at Animal Jam were kind enough to sponsor this post today. I’ll give you my full review of Animal Jam but first here is a teaser of my fun Sea Turtle Quesadilla lunch.

Okay, let me tell you a bit about Animal Jam, so you know where I got my inspiration. Animal Jam is a fun online playground for kids who love animals and the outdoors. One of my son’s friends at school first told him about it and as soon as we created an account my kids were hooked. You can sign-up for a free account and all of the educational materials and most of the activities are available for free. You can sign up for a paid membership and have access to extra games, animals, accessories, and den items.

Animal Jam was created in partnership with National Geographic, and features classic playground role playing infused with the life sciences. Players can collect fun facts in their Journey Books, learn about Animal Conservation in Kimbara Outback, and ask real scientists questions, like herpetologist Dr. Brady Barr and marine biologist Tierney Thys. The educational videos and fun facts are my favorite part of Animal Jam. It’s a little like accidental learning. The kids are just exploring around and all of a sudden they are watching videos about the ocean or bugs and snakes or learning cool animal facts.

Here’s a world map of Jamaa, which is the name for the Animal Jam world. You can see from the photos that you there are all kinds of places to visit like the ocean, Artic, and jungle. Throughout the different areas there are games, educational videos, printable activity sheets, and the opportunity to interact with other kids online.

Animal Jam does allow players to chat with one another. At first I was uneasy with this, but there are robust parental controls and I can control their chat settings. I feel really comfortable with the way it is set up. Animal Jam also regularly produces educational content for players and their parents about digital citizenship and online safety, ensuring that players are aware of how to be safe online. I really appreciate that because like with everything else, learning online safety takes lots of exposure and modeling to see how to behave appropriately. Here’s a screen shot of the parent dashboard.

So in short, my kids LOVE Animal Jam and I feel like it’s a good use of their screen time. It’s fun for them and educational. While I was doing research for my post I both had my kids show me around and then I played too. I thought it was pretty fun too.

I told the kids I was going to be creating a fun food inspired by Animal Jam. They both really like the ocean areas so it seemed like a good fit. We looked through the Animals available and when we saw the sea turtle, a quesadilla with a spinach tortilla flashed in mind.

Want to see how to make your own sea turtle quesadillas?