The Chalk Box

Clyde Robert Bulla's The Chalk Box Kid is a short chapter book for 6 year olds about a boy who grows a garden on a burned-out wall.

What happens

Gregory turns nine on the day his family moves house, and it's shaping up to be the worst birthday he's had. No cake. No party. He spends the evening at his aunt's, going to the door to see whether the car's back yet.

Then his parents show him the new house, and the little room at the back that used to be a porch, and it's his. All of it. He sits on the bed and looks into every corner.

(Best birthday of his life, and nobody bought him a thing.)

It doesn't last. Uncle Max moves in, takes half the room, and puts race-car posters up over Gregory's paintings.

School isn't going well either. Gregory mentions that his old school was bigger, a boy called Vance decides he's a show-off, and that's that settled for everyone.

So he goes out through the back gate instead, into the burned-out building behind the house, and starts clearing it up. Under the bricks he finds two boxes of chalk. The place used to be a chalk factory.

Then a man comes into school to talk about growing things, draws lettuces and radishes on the blackboard, and hands out seeds to the whole class. Gregory has nowhere on earth to plant anything.

You can see what's coming, and it's still lovely when it arrives. Rows of lettuce, sweet peas up poles, a path to a pool with a toad sitting beside it, and trees along the top that he needs a ladder to reach.

And then he starts talking about his garden at school as though it's an ordinary garden, and the others decide to come and see it.

The writing is very plain. Short sentences, small words, almost no description at all, which puts it within reach of a child who's still working hard at reading. The feelings underneath are not small though. Being laughed at by everyone at once is in here, properly and without cushioning.

If your reader has ever been the new one, or the one nobody quite believes, they'll know all of this.

What to read next

For another child who can't get her real self across at school, try Stella Diaz Has Something to Say. Stella loves marine animals, her best friend has been put in a different class, and there's a presentation coming that she's dreading.