Today we passed a pleasant half hour making and drawing with sugar chalk. It’s very easy - dissolve 1/3 cup sugar into 1 cup water. Drop in some pieces of colored chalk and let them soak about ten minutes (enough time to read two or three more books from your Halloween heap), then use the wet sugar chalk to draw on dark construction paper.
First he was just testing the chalk out, to see what it would do. It wrote very smoothly along the paper, and he made a simple spiderweb. I think the big white blob started out as a spider, but the white chalk was so wet that he had a hard time controlling it.
Then, since we were still on a Halloween kick, we each made a haunted house. This was his (just had to make that clear!) - the glowing orange moon was the most fun part to make. The orange chalk really did well with the sugar water and the color was glowing straight away. You can see, though, that he picked up some of the chalks too quickly from the dish of sugar water and they dripped across his paper as he moved them. He says a haunted house is “old and run down and twisted.”
Then, as always, he had to draw a sword, here with a chest plate on the left and a shield on the right.
The dried artwork does sparkle a bit in the right light, but as usual he was more interested in the creation of the works than in the finished product!
We’re still on our Halloween books kick, of course. His favorites this year include:
One Halloween Night by Mark Teague
The Pumpkinville Mystery by Bruce B. Cole
Porkchop’s Halloween by Susan Pearson
Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson
Boo! It’s Halloween by Wendy Watson, especially the knock-knock jokes!
