A Piece of Chalk

We recently read A Piece of Chalk by Jennifer A. Ericsson. It is a simple story about a girl who has a new box of chalk and draws what she sees around her in her driveway. C and R both enjoyed the simplicity of the story, and they loved the way the illustrations unfold.

They want some sort of project with almost every book we read right now, and this one was easy. We went out to the driveway and made our own chalk drawings. I traced both of them with chalk and let them fill in the details.

C was very proud of his chalk rainbow.

We also brought our chalk inside for a few projects.

Our first indoor chalk project was starch chalk. You dip the end of the chalk into a cup of liquid starch and draw with the chalk on paper. Continue dipping and drawing and let dry. The starch enhances the brightness of the chalk and helps resist smudging. I was impressed that a day later the chalk still did not smudge at all and the colors are much brighter than this picture shows.

We also crushed a few small pieces of chalk and mixed it with water to make paint.

Last, we wet shaped sponges and colored them with chalk. Then we pressed the sponges onto paper to make a chalk print. I didn't get a good picture of this because C and R did not really care for this activity. It was hard for them to get enough chalk on the sponges to make a good print.

I recently saw a recipe to make your own chalk paint for outside. We will have to try that someday.

In conclusion, the book was a nice read and we had fun playing with chalk.