Stone Soup, making memories along the way

Cold rain was drizzling down the windows of our Thursday. The kids started out the school day reading and listening along to "Stone Soup" on tape. A story where an old woman says she has no food for a tired boy, so he asks her instead for a stone to make soup from. She has never heard of it, so she wants to watch him make it. He gets her to add things by saying stuff like, "it's cooking fast now, but it would cook faster with some onions... it's smelling good now, but it would smell better with some carrots... it's thin now, but it would be thicker with some butter and barley" etc. etc. She doesn't catch on that the stone really has nothing to do with it. It's just vegetable soup (& beef and potato) that happens to have a stone in the bottom of the pot. There are many different versions of the story. We used Stone Soup by Ann Mcgovern.
My kids listened to it twice, as I added wood to the fire. It was the perfect day for soup. We decided to make real Stone Soup for lunch and turn it into a small unit study for the day. It took all morning to make. As it cooked, we colored a variety of Stone Soup pages and incorporated Bible verses, too, from Lapbooklessons.com. We also used it as an opportunity to talk about the Bible story of Five Loaves of Bread and Two Fish with some of the pages provided. We followed the recipe from the book and added a few small things. The kids did nearly all of it. They also had fun comparing that the stone would sink, while the onions would float. The soup was so tasty, and no, we didn't eat the stone. :) (We saved it for dad's bowl, though.)





Stone Soup
Scrub a stone clean, boil it in a pot of water.
Add onions, garlic, celery, carrots.
Potatoes (not in this version of the story, but is in others and tasty! We cut them up and left the skins on)
"Beef Bones" (we added chunks of beef roast)
Salt and pepper
Butter & Barley (and a little bit of milk, from another version of the story)
A tiny bit of beef broth, if needed.
Enjoy, and share! ;)