Chalk the Block

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 blacktop into track for tricycle test driving.

11. Doctor Frankensketch's Monster Drawing Machine

Created by Michael Sherman & David Avidor

Klutz, 2010

$16.99, ages 8 and up, 20 pages

Dr. Frankenstein wasn't much of a sharer.

Whenever anyone asked how he pieced together his monster, he'd clam up so no one would repeat his hideous mistake.

But thanks to those crazy, devil-may-care editors at Klutz, your kids can now make their own gruesome blunders with Dr. Frankensketch's monster machine.

Within the pages of this clever art book, young dabblers get to assemble and trace a closet full of yellow-eyed, tummy-bulging ghouls.

But beware, the editors warn, as you open the storage locker for the monsters, "Contents may be rabid and angry."

Not to mention brutishly cute.

Inside the book are 20 ready-made ruffians that can be torn along serrated lines into three parts, a head, torso and lower portion with legs, then mixed to create other ghouls that are terribly, adorably wrong.

By themselves, these fellows are already pretty hideous.

There's a pointy-toothed ogre with zebra-striped horns and a clown-size nose and even a four-eyed blue blob that drips goo and has dog bone hands.

For traditionalists, there's also Frankenstein's monster with flat, green head, bolts in his neck and a scowling mouth and a Dracula with menacing brow, beady eyes and bloody lips.

But you haven't seen nothing yet.