Sidewalk Chalk: Outdoor Fun and Games

by Jamie Kyle McGillian, Blanche Sims (Illustrator)

With colored, neon, glittered, swirly, or even plain white chalk, and the ideas in this charmingly illustrated book, the sidewalk's your canvas! Make your own chalk, write your favorite sayings, draw pictures, or play games (such as hopscotch) that include one or more there are so many different suggestions, you won't run out of fun for days. Chalk the town with the holiday calendar creations in these pages--or create silly rebuses to catch the eye of everyone who walks by. (There's an example to start you off.) Bring out the animals for a sidewalk just copy a small part of your favorite beast (like a lion's mane) and challenge your friends to figure out what it is. Whoever guesses right finishes the picture. The hippo-phant drawn here will give you a clue to what crazy things you can do. "chalk talk," where real kids reveal their favorite forms of "chalky" fun!

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Aisha Mitchell]

We have had so much fun with this book! It is split into three categories of create, play, and go along with a recipe to make your own Sidewalk chalk. The activities are easily adaptable for different ages.

[Connie]

I was hoping for something with more creative games. This book had a lot of commonly known (I knew them, anyway) pencil-and-paper games for chalk (like dots, or tic-tac-toe), and a lot of suggestions of different ways to vary drawing with chalk on the sidewalk - things I mostly already knew about.

And some of the sections that could've been expanded weren't. Hopscotch, for example - there are more variations in hopscotch than you can shake a stick at, you could practically write a book on hopscotch *alone*, but they gave it (I guess figuring everybody knew it but that not everybody knows about hangman...?) one page, with a picture of exactly one version of a hopscotch diagram and one version of hopscotch rules. I could (and have) get more information on chalk games through google.

Though the information on making my own sidewalk chalk was nifty, and not something I would've thought of on my own.

[Jody]

Great design ideas. It helped me plan for a sidewalk chalk drawing.