How to Make Story Stones and Different Theme Ideas

October 30, 2025 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

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.

Have you read?

Resources for Learning about Squirrels

Did you know that October is Squirrel Awareness Month? I didn’t know we needed more awareness of these little creatures, but let’s take it as a sign to learn more about squirrels!

Let’s start with some fun facts via Kids Konnect: did you know there are five subfamilies and more that 280 species of squirrels? The smallest are pygmy squirrels and the largest, the Bhutan giant flying squirrel, can be longer that 4 feet (1.2 meters).

Tree squirrels can climb down trees so fast because their ankles can rotate 180 degrees, allowing them to grab the tree bark as they go down. While most squirrels don’t survive their first year of life, they can live five to 10 years in the wild and squirrels have been known to live up to 20 years in captivity!

Rhythms of Play has more fun facts and tips for observing squirrels if you want to add some real life nature to your nature study.

We always like to start these collections with life cycle and parts of the animal printables, so let’s grab the squirrel life cycle an parts of a squirrel worksheets from Montessori Nature. (It doesn’t look like these are free any more but they have a whole unit study on squirrels you can buy that includes life cycle and parts activities, characteristics of different kinds of squirrels, a printable poster, information about predators and more.)

Grab the squirrel lapbook printable (free with email address) from Homeschool Share to learn the parts of a squirrel, where they live, what they eat, whether they hibernate and more. There’s also a nut taste test printable, a place for making observations about squirrels, life cycle of an oak tree, games and more.

Simple Everyday Mom has some cute squirrel themed worksheets including tracing the letter s, labeling the parts of a squirrel and a letter s maze. She also has more activity pages with a squirrel theme, including matching, a more traditional maze and a counting and graphing activity.

Work on letter recognition with this squirrel and acorn game printable from Teaching Mama. I love the idea of hiding the letters in a fall themed sensory bin for kids to find, identify and match to the letter on the worksheet.

For older kids you can do this “if I were a squirrel” writing prompt from Lesson Planet.

And throw in a little counting with these squirrel and acorn tens frame printables from JDaniel4’s Mom, which you can use to count real acorns or any other little fall themed thing you have handy.

Have you read?

Leave a Reply