How to Make Story Stones and Different Theme Ideas

Story stones are a fun way to change up your storytelling with kids, whether you have a set that specifically goes with a story you like to tell or you have a bunch of rocks with different images on them you use to tell a story.

When my daughter was little we didn’t have story stones but we did have storytelling dice, which you roll and then make up a story that includes all the images.

Making your own story stones is a lot of fun, and this post from The Wild Cherry Farm is a good overview of how to make them and how to play with them. Older kids can help paint or draw on the stones, while younger kids can offer ideas for the subject matter of the stones.

The post also has some good ideas for ways to play with the stones, such as randomly drawing a set amount from a bag, telling a story with the stones in the order you pulled them, or working together to tell a story picking one stone at a time.

In addition to general images like the sun, rain, a princess, a house, things of that nature, you might want to consider different themes for your story stones. If you’re making them for home use you can make stones that cover your child’s current obsession like dinosaurs, butterflies or things of a particular color.

Kristin Marcelli made a bunch of little story stones with simple Sharpie drawings of different things on them, and her post includes a good list of things you might want to include on your stones. These tiny ones would be fun to add to your small world play or even use to play with playdough and other sensory activities.

I love this set from Little Lifelong Learners that uses stickers instead of painting, because that’s an easy way to get a themed set (which you might also use in a sensory bin when doing a unit study or week on that theme).

Little Pine Learners has some great ideas for story stone sets and how to use them in the classroom. I love these seasonal sets, but they also have ideas for using them for sequencing (you tell a story and the kids pick the stones that tell the story in order) and more.

Homeschool Preschool turns story stones into an alphabet activity with an image for every letter of the alphabet. These can be used for storytelling, learning letters and the words for things and lots more.

Growing Up Ladybug and How to Become a Butterfly are both by Stepanka Sekaninova and illustrated by Linh Dao, and they came out at the same time and are on similar themes, so let’s look at them together.

Growing Up Ladybug is narrated by Mariella, a seven-spot ladybug. She talks about the parts of a ladybug, where they live, different kinds of ladybugs, why humans love them, their defenses against predators and the life cycle of a ladybug.

The drawings are cute if not always scientifically accurate, it’s not in such a way that’s likely to confuse kids (who probably already know that ladybug mamas don’t push their larval babies around in strollers, for instance.

It’s a good general description of the life cycle of a lady bug and why we like having them around.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Similarly, How to Become a Butterfly covers the life cycle of a butterfly, starting with caterpillars eating burning nettle leaves. (Here Amanda is the narrator.) The book talks about a few of the more than 18,000 daytime butterflies in the world as well as other creatures that live in the meadow (there’s that ladybug again, along with crickets, bees and other bugs).

It also covers some of the enemies of caterpillars like wasps and spiders, and the defenses that caterpillars use to try to prevent being eaten. It illustrates how caterpillars grow and change as they molt and prepare to pupate, and what a caterpillar looks like before and while it is forming its chrysalis. And while the book uses the word metamorphasis it doesn’t really talk about what happens between the caterpillar forming a chrysalis and the butterfly hatching.

This butterfly is a peacock butterfly, and once it hatches the book covers the parts of a butterfly and the life cycle. It also talks about nocturnal moths (though it says nocturnal butterflies are “usually called moths” when moths are actually a different species) and what butterflies do at night.

I’m maybe a little hard on this book because my daughter is a butterfly expert from way back, but it is still cute and good for the very basic basics of the butterfly life cycle.

Both books would be fun additions to your bookshelf for younger kids starting to learn about different animals or who have an interest in insects.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Have you read?

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