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Add Humor to Your Neighborhood
By Michael Sherman
Klutz, 2011
$12.99, ages 6 and up, 40 pages.
Concrete got the blahs around your block?
Grab some chalk and turn all that wear and tear to your comic advantage.
In this fun twist on an old pastime, Sherman inspires kids to turn ugly concrete into a crack up with a few strokes of chalk.
"Release your inner smart aleck," he encourages before taking readers through a basic how-to and a slew of his own ideas.
The book comes with four fat pieces of chalk and pictures of cracks, walls, steps, rocks even drains dressed up silly.
There's even a section on how to take hopscotch up a notch (literally up a wall) and transform flat top into track for tricycle test driving.
A split in the sidewalk becomes a perch for birds that never fly away or the gaping mouth of a monster ready to snag the feet that cross it.
The more broken, cracked or tilted the pavement, the better.
In one picture, hairline cracks become lightening bolts crashing down from a cloud. In another, a sewing needle drawn from chalk stitches up a big crack in a driveway that's split in two.
And don't forget to put a choo choo train on that mountainous crack crossing the basketball court.
You start to see how a chalk drawer could feel like they owe every crack a chance to be more than a flaw at their feet.
And cracks are just the beginning. Anywhere there's hardtop, there are bound to be imperfections, scattered debris, an inkling of something cool.
Pebbles on the sidewalk become the knobs of a chalk-drawn Etch-a-Sketch, the body of dangling spider or the wheels of cars backed up on sidewalk seams.
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