Toys and Games, Uncategorized

Angry Birds Epic Game Review

We get Wesley Williams from FamilyGamerTV to go hands on with the Angry Birds Epic role-playing game on the iPad and delve deep into the first levels of Red’s quest to recover the stolen eggs from the evil Wiz Pig! Watch as we fight off a variety of King Pig’s subjects in turn-based battles, free Chuck from their evil clutches, explore our first dungeon and craft a new weapon with all the loot we acquire along the way.

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Home, Health & Style, Popular

8 Supermarket Tricks to Make Your Parents Spend More

You might have noticed that many supermarkets have a similar layout. This is no coincidence. Researchers have spent many years working out how to set out the store in order to get customers to spend more! See how many of these supermarket tricks you recognise, the next time you go shopping with your parents!

 

Huge Trolleys 

Shopping Trolley

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Shopping trollies are deliberately MUCH larger than needed for a weekly shop, which encourages customers to buy more. In fact, they’ve been getting bigger and bigger in the past few years.

 

The Bakery at the Entrance

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That smell of freshly baked bread? Not only does it make you want to buy a yummy loaf, it also makes you hungry. It is well known that if you go shopping when you are hungry, you buy more!

 

Tempting Fruit and Veg

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After the bakery, comes the fruit and veg section. This often strikes me as a bit daft – by the time I get around to tins and packets of pasta, my salad is squashed at the bottom of the trolley! The bright colours tempt customers, and lots of supermarkets present fruit and veg in baskets or crates, to make it seem like they’ve come straight from the farm! Once you’ve filled your trolley with healthy produce, you’ll feel better about the packets of biscuits and crisps that come later!

 

Essentials Around the Store

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Just popping in with your parents to quickly to pick up some eggs, or milk? You might notice that these essentials, and others like sugar, salt and flour, are spread around the store. The supermarket planners want you to walk around the store as much as possible, passing all those tempting special offers at the end of the aisles.

 

End of Aisle Offers

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The shelves at the end of the aisles are the ones that we pay most attention to, and so supermarkets stack their special offers there, to persuade you to buy them. These are often things like fizzy drinks, that you might not normally purchase.

 

Loyalty Cards

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Supermarkets don’t just give their customers loyalty cards to encourage them to come back to their stores. They also use the data (information) collected to target their advertising better. If your parents have a loyalty card, have a look at the next letter they receive to see if they are giving discounts on products that your family often buy. Have a think about what the supermarket would know about your family – if you have a pet, when you have birthdays (e.g. if you buy a cake in the store), what toys you like, which interests you have (e.g. your parents bought a magazine about traveling to Italy).

 

Sweets at the Checkout

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Ok, hands up if you’ve ever asked your parents for sweets when you were at the checkout! In Germany, they have a word for this – Quengelware. The word is made up of “quengeln” which means “to whine” and “Ware”, which means products. Products that make kids whine or grump at their parents, who are fed up with the hassle of shopping and give in to their kids’ demands! Some supermarkets now advertise that they have lanes without sweets, so that parents can avoid this argument.

 

Kids’ Products at Your Eye Level

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Talking of kids in supermarkets, did you ever notice that products aimed at kids are displayed at your eye level? The cheese strings are placed at that height in the hope that you will ask for them!

 

How many of these supermarket tricks did you recognise? Next time you go shopping, take a good look at how the store is laid out and see if you can find some more.

 

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Language & Literature

The Doncaster Book Awards – By Kids for Kids

Doncaster Book Awards Shortlist 2018

There are lots of children’s book awards, but the Doncaster Book Awards is special. That’s because children decide not only which books they want to win, but even which ones are on the shortlist.
Doncaster is in Yorkshire, in the north of England. Lots of schools in the area, alongside many home-educated kids, register and take part in the awards. First, the children select the shortlist for different categories of books, and these are then voted on by all the schools and the children. Sometimes book publishers ask to get their books on the list, but the answer is always no. This one is by children, for children!

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Toys and Games

Make Your Own Interactive Story!

Find out how to make your own interactive story with Jump! Mag and storyteller Justine de Mierre. 

Some people think stories are just for little kids, but stories are all around us. We watch them on television, we read them in books – we even listen to them when someone’s telling us about their great weekend!

Stories aren’t just fairy tales, they can be about businesswomen and athletes just as much as about princesses and trolls.  They can even be about princess-like businesswomen and athletic trolls!

So, if you’re planning a get together with your friends why not give storytelling a go? An interactive story is one you can make up on the spot and gets everyone joining in – and it can be about whatever you and your friends are interested in!

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Home, Health & Style

Health Matters … Threadworm

threadworms

In the second of a series of articles on health, pharmacist and writer Asha Fowells looks at threadworms. This may make you go ‘euuuuuw’, but it is an important thing to know about, because while threadworms are icky, they are reasonably easy to treat.
The term “parasitic infection” may make you think of intrepid explorers in rainforests and jungles, but there is one parasite that lurks much closer to home: threadworm.

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