August 20 – National Lemonade Day

Happy Lemonade Day!

Pucker up, it’s an unofficial holiday celebrating that tart and tangy lemon drink we all enjoy…. it’s lemonade.  Make yours with as much or as little sugar as you like. Pour a tall cold glass and enjoy a picture book.

Let’s start with a tall cool glass for our youngest friends.


Maisy Makes Lemonade written and illustrated by Lucy Cousins (2002)

Maisy Mouse shares a nice cold drink with her friend Eddie Elephant and it’s all gone! Maisy has an idea. With Eddie’s help, Maisy picks more lemons, squeezes the juice into a pitcher, adds water and sugar, and they have a fresh, delicious lemonade.


Lemonade Stand written by Marcia Vaughan and illustrated by Tom Payne (1999)

All Aboard Reading – Level 1 (Pre-school to Grade 1)

Friends, Boomer and Squeak, set up a lemonade stand on a hot summer day. As they wait for customers, they talk about what they will buy with their portion of the money they make, but no one comes to buy lemonade. They each buy a glass of lemonade for themselves and then another for each other. Squeak tried advertising by running up and down the road with a sign, but that only made him more thirsty. He’s run out of money so he borrows from the till. Boomer borrows also, and at the end of the day they realize that they have no lemonade and only five cents. They can’t buy any of the things they had talked about, but they do have enough money for one more glass of lemonade from Mrs. Pip’s store!


Caterina and the Lemonade Stand written and illustrated by Erin Eitter Kono (2014)

Caterina is a resourceful brown bird with ‘great big colorful thoughts’. She wants to buy a scooter. But since money doesn’t grown on trees (and lemons do), she decides to have a lemonade stand. It seems that everyone in the neighborhood has a lemonade stand too, so Caterina has to make her’s special. She adds music, lights, and decorations to make her lemonade stand unique. And when she has made enough money for a scooter, she buys one… for her assistant, Leo!


The Lemon Sisters written by Andrea Cheng and illustrated by Tatjana Mai-Wyss (2006)

Three little girls playing in the snow, Blue Hat, Red Hat, and Yellow Hat, help make an older neighbor lady happy on her birthday. She is eighty years old, and misses her two sisters, Rita and Mae, very much. Watching the Hats play in the snow, she remembers when she and her sisters made Lemon Ices in the snow using lemons and sugar. She offers the girls the ingredients to make their own Lemon Ice. When she goes back in to warm up in her bed, her sisters arrive with a surprise birthday cake. The Hat girls make the Lemon Sisters three big thrones in the snow and invite them outside for Lemon Ices, making this the best birthday their neighbor had in all of her eighty years.

And for the older, wiser, savvy picture book lover…


The Lemonade Club written and illustrated by Patricia Polacco (2007)

This is another beautiful Patricia Polacco story about two best friends who have to grow up too fast. Their teacher, Miss Wichelman, keeps lemons on her desk, and every day she reminds the students to use life’s lemons to make lemonade. Then one day, Marilyn is diagnosed with leukemia in the fifth grade. Everyone in class is devastated, even Miss Wichelman. When the announcement was made at school, everyone fought back tears or cried out loud. Marilyn started chemotherapy and lost all her hair. Even when she’s feeling her worst, her best friend, Traci, and her teacher, Miss Wichelman, visit and help her feel better. Miss Wichelman even invites the girls to come to her wedding. When Marilyn did return to school wearing a scarf around her head, she found all her classmates wearing funny hats. As they pulled their hats off, Marilyn saw that they were all bald, even Miss Wichelman! Weeks later, when their hair started growing back, they realized that Miss Wichelman’s hair was not growing back. That’s when she told them that she had breast cancer and that she was going to have surgery. It took five years, but the class was finally reunited for Miss Wichelman’s wedding and the girls, her bridesmaids, wore lemon yellow dresses. In those five years, Miss Wichelman battled cancer and won, and had become a doctor herself!

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