Ms. Spurgeon, a fabulous third grade teacher, does a Stone Soup folktale study with her students each year. This is a part of the folktale study that third grade just kicked off. She has her students study multiple versions of Stone Soup and consider how the characters, setting, and plot change based on where the story is taking place or which country the story comes from. Students are quickly discovering that the basic themes of Stone Soup stay the same but characters, setting, and the ingredients in the soup change.
Today, we read Jon J. Muth’s version of Stone Soup. We loved hearing the many different kinds of ingredients that were added to the soup such as pea pods, lily buds, taro root, winter melon, and more.
After we finished the story, we revisited our Google form of folktale elements to see how Stone Soup compared with other folktales we have read. We noticed that the following elements appeared in all 4 folktales that we have read in 3rd grade:
- flat characters
- fantasy time
- setting briefly described
- plot full of action
- repeated phrases
Classes will continue to fill out the form and make comparisons.
To conclude this lesson, we used Tagxedo to make our own digital bowl of Stone Soup. I asked students to think about what ingredients they might add to a class stone soup if they were to go home right now and get something out of their cabinets, refrigerator, or from a neighbor. While students were checking out books, they came up to me and told me 2-3 ingredients, which I typed into Tagxedo. I selected a circle shape to represent the pot of soup, and here is what our soup looked like at the end of our time together.