Chalk

I absolutely love this book! The fact it contains no words makes it all the more brilliant. The illustrations are wonderful and clearly tell the story while actively supporting the use of imagination.

Chalk
Bill Thomson
Marshall Cavendish Children, 38p.
2010
Picture book (wordless)
4-10 years
The story in this wordless book is quick and simple, which provides beautiful balance for the detailed, realistic illustrations. Children walking in the rain discover a bag of chalk, and find that their drawings

Show More

come to life. The faces of these children are perfectly expressive - one knows just what they are thinking, or saying.

Show Less

Chalk, a wordless book, is a celebration of the imagination as three children explore their own emotions as the chalk drawings come to life...a wonderful prompt for parents and teachers!

This wordless picture book is about a group of children who find a bag of sidewalk chalk. As they draw, their pictures begin to come to life. They draw a sun, a butterfly, and eventually a T-Rex. Using some quick thinking they draw a raincloud and wash the T-Rex away.

This book had great

Show More

illustrations, and a good story.

The best activity for this would be to take the students outside and give them sidewalk chalk!

Show Less

This is a great book! Wonderful illustrations. I love that there are no words. Every time I read it to my little one she gets a new story. My little one just soaks up the illustrations, I imagine that she is transported into the story with how wide her eyes get. She especially loves the

Show More

butterflies. :)

Show Less

The story is set in a park, on a rainy day. The kids find a bag of sidewalk chalk hanging from the mouth of a large plastic dinosaur toy. One child draws a sun on the sidewalk, and miraculously it stops raining and rays of sun shine through a hole in the clouds! Then one girl starts drawing

Show More

butterflies on the ground, then they come to life, and soon the sky is full of butterflies. Then one boy gets a mischievous look on his face (I really liked the expressions on the children's faces in this book!)and he begins to draw a dinosaur, a T-Rex. It comes alive and the kids must hide in the play structure slide to escape this terrifying beast. One little girl starts to draw raindrops on the inside of the slide, and huge drops of water begin to fall from the sky. The dinosaur is melted by the rain, and the kids are free to leave for home.

Show Less

Summary- The kids at park find the chalk to magical one day. Everything they draw comes to life. A dinosaur is drawn and he starts chasing the kids around the park. Thankfully, the rain saves the kids by washing the dinosaur away.

Strength- Illustrations
The illustrations of this book tell the

Show More

entire story. It is incredible how much you know about the characters and storyline without a single word on the page.

Use with Kids- Ask the students to write thinking bubbles above the heads of the kids in the story. What were they thinking on each page?

Show Less

A wordless picture book of chalk drawings, that magically come to life, creating an adventure for the trio of kids who created them.

This is an amazing wordless picture book, Can be used for many grade levels, including pre-K. Chalk is about 3 children walking in the park on a rainy day, and come across a bag of chalk, as the children begin to draw, there drawings come to life. great for sparking imagination, wonderful life like

Show More

illustrations. Can be used to to create own dialogue.

Show Less

This is such a beautifully illustrated wordless book. Thomson's incredibly detailed and realistic artwork brings this magical story to life. Three friends head to the playground on a rainy afternoon. When they find some chalk, they quickly discover that imagination can come to life in the most

Show More

magical ways. A beautiful work of art for kids and adult. For ages 5 and up.

Show Less

This book is strikingly beautiful, the images jump off the page. Even though this book has no text the images clearly tell the story and convey such fun and imagination. The concept of the magic chalk is so original and fun and the drawings are so lifelike.

This is a great book. I think the illustrations are amazing. I love the "story-line" and the cleverness of how the children got rid of the dinosaur. I was glad to see that the children were not all white and that it was girls and a boy playing together. I was a tiny bit annoyed with the promotion

Show More

of the images of the girls as being "cutesy" and drawing the sun and butterflies but the boy being "fiendish" and drawing the dinosaur (although glad that the author also made the boy smart to draw the rain again).

Show Less

I loved the super realistic illustrations in this book. I also loved the feeling of imagination, childhood, and adventure I got from this book. I remember when I was little and I'd wish the things I drew would come to life. This book reminds me of the adventure with imagination of childhood because

Show More

of how simple it was for the trio to solve their problem of drawing a rain cloud to wash away their disaster.
Chalk is about a story of three kids who take a trip to the park on a rainy day. One of the play structure toys has a bag of chalk hanging from it's mouth. The kids start drawing things only to soon realize what they draw comes to life! One of the boys decides to draw a T-rex and when it comes to life it was clearly a bad decision because it starts chasing them (most likely to eat!). The three of them run into a tunnel, and one of them draws a rain cloud so that it can start raining again. When it starts raining the dinosaur washes away, just as chalk would if it was on the ground. The kids return the bag to the toy dinosaurs mouth and walk away, on with their day.

Show Less

On a shopping trip to the bookstore, the book seller pointed out this magical wordless picture book to me and my old Language Arts teacher-self awoke! There is so much potential for class discussion, story writing and even readers theater with this book. I loved the images and can't wait to

Show More

introduce it to my teachers.

Show Less

This wordless picture book takes you through (absolutely amazing) illustrations of children finding magical chalk. When the children draw on the ground with the chalk the items come alive. The butterfly coming alive is swell but when the dinosaur the boy draws comes alive it begins to attack the

Show More

children.

The illustrations are AMAZING! There's a special note at the back that demonstrates that none of them are digitally mastered. They are all traditional painting techniques. You should see this book just to check out how brilliant of a story it is without a SINGLE WORD!!

Show Less

Imagine if whatever you drew actually came to life? Three youngsters find a bucket of chalk and whatever they draw actually appears. This is fun until one of the boys draws a dinosaur! This book has no words, but the pictures are beautifully done in realistic acrylic and colored pencil. Young

Show More

readers will love to imagine through the story and older students might want to write their own text to go with the story.

Show Less

Read this to my kindergarten and first grade students. They all loved it! They enjoyed adding their own stories to the pictures to describe what was happening or might happen - some were very creative! Everyone enjoyed the magic of this simple, beautifully illustrated story.

Thomson, Bill. Chalk. Tarrytown, NY: Marshall Cavendish Children, 2010

Characters: Three children- 1 boy and 2 girls

Setting: a rainy day at a park

Theme: wordless book, imagination, drawing

Genre: Children’s fiction, wordless picturebook

Golden Quote: Not applicable

Summary: A wordless picture book

Show More

about three children who go to a park on a rainy day, find some chalk, and draw pictures that come to life.

Audience: Grades 1-3

Curriculum ties: language arts- narrate/write a story to the correspond to the pictures, create a writing prompt based on events in the book
Awards: Buckeye Children's Book Award for 3-5 (2011); Connecticut Book Award (Children's Illustrator) (2011); ALA Notable Children's Book (2011); IRA Teacher's Choices (2011); Kentucky Bluegrass Book Award (2012)

Personal response: I absolutely love this book! Bill Thomson takes something as simple as chalk and transcends it into something magical. On a rainy day, three children discover a bag of chalk hanging from a playground dinosaur spring rider and from there; the adventure ensues into something they never expected. As they use the chalk to draw, their sidewalk art starts to come to life and so do their imaginations…and to the edge of extreme danger! There is a clear message to be careful for what you wish for because you just might get it (which is not always a good thing). Bill Thomson’s illustrations are amazing; so lifelike they look like photographs. The artwork is so realistic and rich that both children and adults will find new details every time they encounter this book. I highly recommend this story for dinosaurs lovers everywhere.

Show Less

This book emphasizes the power of imagination. This is evidenced in how the children's chalk drawings came to life and how the children used their imaginations to come up with a solution to their T-rex troubles. This book could also be used in the classroom to teach the comprehension skill of

Show More

inferring. Since there are no words to help tell the story, readers must use the pictures to infer what is happening and what will happen next.

Show Less

I love Bill Thomson's art. Love, love, love it. It's one tiny magical step removed from realistic, and it shines from within, somehow. The story is wonderful- there's magic and beauty and a boy who chooses unwisely and then it gets really scary for a minute but it all works out for the best in the

Show More

end. This one could end up being a favorite.

Show Less

This book is about sidewalk chalk that magically comes to life. It is pretty awesome. It also has no words.

Three children find themselves on the playground one rainy afternoon, and discovering a bag of chalk hanging from one of the rides - the dinosaur ride! - they begin to draw. To their surprise and delight, whatever they draw is magically made real: a sunny day, a kaleidoscope of butterflies, a

Show More

Tyrannosaurus Rex! Now, on the run from their creation (well, the boy's creation, in any event), they must find a way to undo what they have done...

Chosen as one of our January selections for the Picture-Book Club to which I belong, where our theme is "wordless picture-books," Chalk is an engaging tale of adventure, ably carried along by Bill Thomson's acrylic and colored-pencil illustrations. I appreciated many of the details of these paintings: the young African-American girl's hands, when she picks up the chalk, the young boy's backward glance, as the friends leave the park. I wasn't disturbed, as some reviewers seem to have been, that it is the boy's actions which both precipitate and resolve the crisis. All in all, this is one I recommend to any young reader who enjoys wordless picture-books!

Show Less

Chalk, by Bill Thomson (2010) is a wonderfully illustrated wordless picture book that tells the story of three friends who happen upon a bag of different colored chalk during a rainstorm. Soon they discover that the chalk has magical powers, which they use to solve a problem they got themselves

Show More

into.

In the classroom, I would use this as a mentor text to talk to kids about how a story can be told using only pictures. Perhaps they'd like to write their own words to go with the story, as well? Grades 2-5.

Show Less

Enjoyed the big illustrations without words here! It reminded me a little bit of Jumanji.