This week we were enveloped in the story of Stone Soup written by Jon J. Muth. Bennet had read it last week and encouraged us to make our own batch of stone soup. On Monday, we started our day by reading the story together.
The story is about three monks traveling a mountain and come across a famine-ridden, war-torn village where all of its villagers are suspicious and afraid of other people and each other. The villagers hide in their homes, afraid the strange monks. The monks set out to teach the villagers about happiness and begin to make “stone soup”. It starts out with only three round stones. This soup entices the villagers out of their homes to learn how to make the soup. Ingredient by ingredient, the monks convince the villagers to help them by providing spices, vegetables and other ingredients. The act of sharing brings everyone together and inspires trust and kindness throughout the village again. At the end of the story, they share a feast as a celebration for discovering what it means to be happy.
As we read the story, the kids noted all of the ingredients they added to the soup and Neha made a list. After we had completed our list, we walked to our local TGP grocery store and searched for the groceries. Jasper friends did great on our field trip and had a wonderful time working together to find the right ingredients. On Tuesday we washed, prepped and put all of our ingredients into a crock pot in the morning and monitored it while it cooked for 7 hours. On Wednesday we took a trip with Alix to the seniors lodge kitchen to bake some biscuits to go along with our stone soup and then finished the project off by having a huge feast for afternoon snack. Jasper room was really invested in this three day project and are very proud of the soup they’ve made – even if they thought it tasted horrible! Remember, process over product. ?
We ended the week on Thursday and Friday by relaxing and enjoying the freshly fallen snow outside and feeling musical with Dawn. Onto igloo news, we have collected 67 milk jugs this week and still need 333 to be able to build our igloo. It was a busy week once again in Jasper room and we can’t wait until next week to see what adventures begin!