With spring and summer just around the corner, children are excited to get outside to play. Sidewalk chalk games and activities are the perfect way to take learning outdoors. These fun activities are engaging and you can easily ensure you’re still covering the essential concepts.
So, grab a giant box of sidewalk chalk, take your students or children outside, and try out some of our favorite sidewalk chalk activities and games from the list below.
1. Invite the Neighborhood on a Treasure Hunt
Children will enjoy creating a fun and interactive chalk treasure hunt. They can spend the entire summer creating these for each other and the neighborhood. Planning the treasure hunt out beforehand can be a great activity to encourage forward planning and organizational skills.
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2. Color Hop for Toddlers
This fun game is a perfect activity for toddlers. Draw out circles of different colors and then call out a color for children to hop to. You can easily adapt this activity also to shape or letter recognition tasks.
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3. Chalk Color Sorting Game
This toddler-approved activity is a perfect introduction to sorting activities. Using different colored chalks, draw circles and then task children with finding items and objects and then sorting them into the circles based on their colors.
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4. Make Your Own Board Game
Create your own super-sized game board with this fun sidewalk chalk idea. From snakes and ladders to Monopoly, depending on how much time you have and the age of the players, you can adapt this activity to play just about any board game.
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5. Number Rocks Counting Activity
Outdoor chalk activities make for the perfect opportunity to play educational games. This activity is a superb example of math in action for preschoolers as they place the number of rocks in each circle depending on what number is in the circle. This is a fantastic opportunity to reinforce counting, using concrete materials.
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6. Mosaic Chalk Heart
This activity will entertain kids for hours during those warmer end-of-term days before summer vacation. This chalk art idea uses lots of colors and is sure to brighten up any sidewalk or playground. You can start with the mosaic heart but then create different images.
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7. DIY Sidewalk Chalk Paint
Create stunning chalk art with this kid’s favorite chalk paint recipe. This simple recipe only requires three ingredients and will wash away just as easily as normal chalk in the rain. Children can experiment with painting with different brushes and on different textures to see what effects they get.
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8. Twister
Create your own chalk Twister board! All you’ll need are four colors of chalk and either the spinner from the game or you can create your own.
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9. Dots and Lines Game
Sidewalk chalk games are a great way to pass the time outdoors and the dots and lines game is no exception. Create a grid of dots and then children take turns drawing one line at a time. The aim of the game is to complete as many boxes as possible and mark them with their own initials to claim them. The player with the most boxes at the end wins!
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10. A Game of Corners
This classic game is guaranteed to become one of your pupils’ favorites. Begin by drawing four numbered corners on the ground with sidewalk chalk before designating one player as the caller. They’ll close their eyes and count down from 10 while you prompt the rest of your class to run to a corner of their choice. The caller will then shout out a number between 1 and 4, and any players in that corner will be out for the rest of the game.
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11. Driving or Riding Through The Alphabet
This excellent chalk activity is super simple to set up and has lots of variations you can do. Simply write the letters of the alphabet on the ground and get children to walk or cycle through them in order.
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12. Follow This Sidewalk Art Tutorial
This YouTube channel has lots of fun chalk activities in the form of sidewalk chalk artwork. Follow along with this tutorial for how to draw this cute elephant, or head over to the channel for tutorials of other animals to draw.
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13. Fly Swat Spelling
This educational activity is perfect for encouraging children to recognize individual letters, both upper and lower case. Fun letter activities are a great active way to get children to spell.
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14. Create Fun Photo Opportunities
Children will love creating this life-sized artwork, which makes for a perfect photo opportunity! Creating interactive chalk art like this one is a perfect and creative way to pass the hot summer days.
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15. Chalk Fractions
Fractions are a notoriously difficult concept for students to grasp, so any opportunity for some math practice in this area is a bonus. This active math activity is perfect to illustrate fractions in action and help students visualize the concepts. This really is one of the best educational sidewalk chalk activities to do, especially with a class that is covering fractions!
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16. Water Balloon Math
Let children hone their math skills with these fun interactive learning games. They can solve math equations written on water balloons by spatting them onto the correct answer. You can switch up the types of equations, and make the question/answer pairings more challenging for older, more advanced learners.
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17. Sorting Natural Materials
Spend endless hours with these fun outdoor learning activities. Children can select their own sorting categories, write these categories on the ground with chalk and then find natural materials to sort out. Children will enjoy being outdoors, especially as the weather improves and this will help to make their learning fun!
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18. Sidewalk Chalk Math Game
All you’ll need to set up this super fun, outdoor math game is some chalk and some dice (preferably giant foam dice). This hands-on game is great to practice concepts both new and old in an exciting way that keeps students engaged.
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