Sidewalk Chalk and a New School Year

Summer’s here, and I’m busy thinking and reading and writing my way through my backlog of ideas for school.

Recently, another educator told me about a sidewalk chalk poetry assignment she observed students doing at a high school in Texas—specifically, she talked about the joy and authentic literacy of the assignment.

I couldn’t help but wonder how sidewalk chalk could be used at the beginning of the year. The beginning of the year is an interesting time for students and for teachers. It can be a new beginning; it can be a continuation of a journey toward some goal (e.g., graduation, college, etc.); it can be an unknown; it can be something that motivates; it can be scary; it can be uncertain; essentially, a new school year can be have a myriad of characteristics depending on the student, teacher, parent, or administrator.

As I considered all the potential characteristics of a new school year, I asked myself these questions: What’s my goal at the beginning of the year? What do I need to establish with my students? What do I need them to know quickly? How can I establish expectations and norms through a lens of joy?

My goal is to establish a joyful collaborative environment, one where students understand that I expect a high level of thinking and writing. We work together to connect reading—both their everyday reading and the reading we do in class—to both formal and informal writing that displays thinking and the way in which the students are constructing knowledge.

And as I thought more about the sidewalk chalk poetry activity, I couldn’t help but think that sidewalk chalk was a way for me to connect all these goals and needs together.

As a rule, I dislike inauthentic getting-to-know-you activities that proliferate during the beginning of the year, so I am planning a new activity featuring sidewalk chalk. First, I will ask students to work together to find quotes about school. They can come up with quotes about education, motivation, achievement, knowledge, goal setting, new beginnings, or anything related to the school year. By coming up with a quote that relates to themselves and the school year, I get to know them in more authentic ways that offer a chance for real discussion within the class. And they also get a chance to get to know one another in their groups as they discuss their quotes and why they chose them.

This activity will also allow me an early glimpse into who they are, what they’ve read and watched, what they connect to, and what they find important. Furthermore, it gives me a chance to establish culturally responsive connections that create a bridge between their prior knowledge, their interests, and the literacy of my classroom space, while also establishing collaborative group norms and individual expectations for writing and discussion. Win-win for me.

But it doesn’t end with the quotes. We then take our quotes to the sidewalks and write them with chalk on the concrete surrounding the school. (My school has a ton of concrete space that students traverse daily.)

To ensure the success of this early year, I will need clear guidance—a graphic organizer for collaborative groups to collect quotes beyond Googling “inspirational quotes,” a mini-Socratic discussion about the quotes and why they connect to education or motivation or new beginnings, and an end writing that features how to synthesize quotes from different sources together in a final paragraph, all of which I’ve developed and put in my store.

Here’s what I’m imagining: a school where students have written inspirational quotes about new beginnings, motivation, education, and goals throughout the school’s concrete. As other students walk over these quotes, they stop and read and take pictures even of the sidewalk chalk quotes. This literacy experience invites not just the students who wrote the quotes to participate but also the whole school, creating an authentic experience for the school community. I’m hoping that this experience will be joyful for all students in my classes and within the school community!

I’m so excited to try this on the second day of school. One reason I love summer: I get to talk to teachers outside my district who inspire me to create something new!