Stone Soup Activities for Kids

January 18, 2025 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

I don’t know why I was thinking about this the other day, but one of my favorite times at my daughter’s preschool was when all the families were invited to make stone soup. Stone Soup is a classic story (and there are actually a few different books that tell it from different authors) but the idea is that no one wants to share what they have until someone suggests making stone soup, and then everyone adds what they have to make the soup better, ultimately creating a lovely meal for all to share.

There’s a short version of the story you can print out from Education.com if you don’t have the book version handy.

We literally did this by every family bringing something to add (our contribution was multi-colored carrots), and Rainy Day Mum has a post about doing this with her kiddo, though it’s more fun to do as a group. You can use the “recipe” in the version of the book you read or just have everyone bring a vegetable. They also used a potato as their stone; I think we had a real stone that had been washed and wrapped in foil.

Here’s another recipe from Primary Playground. They also have a free printable coloring page on Teachers Pay Teachers where kids can color in the items that are in their soup. There’s also a paid set of printables on how to make soup with a little book and sequencing activities, which you can use to make soup in class or at home.

Use the science activity from Books and Giggles to make a prediction as to whether soup with a stone in it will taste different from regular soup. This requires two pots but you can start it all in one pot then add some to another pot with a stone in it.

Mrs. Albanese’s Class has free printable vegetable cards you can use when talking about stone soup (and if you don’t want to make real soup in the classroom you can use them for storytelling along with play vegetables).

Susan Jones on Teachers Pay Teachers has a nice set of worksheets kids can use to compare and contrast different versions of the story, make a book about their own soup and more. Check out her blog post about it for all the details.

Do you use stone soup in the classroom or at home? I’d love to hear how you do it!

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Learning Activities with Snap Cubes

A classic manipulative in the preschool and early elementary classroom is the snap cube, also known as math cubes, unifix cubes or unit cubes. These little one inch cubes often come in a set of 100 in 10 different colors, and they snap together so they’re easy to use for all sorts of math learning, measuring and more.

No Time for Flashcards has a cute robot printable to use with cubes to measure the height of each robot. That one is free but they also have other printable cube mats that are a paid resource.

Catherine & Co uses math cubes to teach kids about measuring volume. They make a letter from cubes and then measure the volume (there’s a printable worksheet in the post).

Pattern recognition is another fun and easy activity you can do with the cubes. You can use printables like these from Planning Playtime, or just make a pattern from cubes and have kids repeat it or figure out what comes next. There’s another good set of pattern printables at English Created Resources.

Because there are 10 sets of 10 cubes in a pack, these are great for teaching one to one correspondence, counting, sorting and basic addition and subtraction. English Created Resources has great printable number mats you can use to form the number from cubes and count out the number of cubes that corresponds to that number.

ParenTutor has a great collection of snap cube activity ideas, most of which are just pictures, but it’s work taking a look through the post for ideas for using them at home or in the classroom.

To give just a few of their examples, you can match linked blocks to the corresponding number of pieces, use blocks to find different ways to add up to 10, compare numbers and determine which one is more or less, skip counting and weighing different numbers of blocks.

You can also use unit cubes to learn letters, like with these super cute alphabet mats from Fun Learning for Kids. Kids can trace the letter, make it out of cubes and practice writing a word that starts with that letter.

Of course you can also use them to build things, since they are blocks, and there are tons of pattern mats on Teachers Pay Teachers. I also love these dinosaur themed mats from Lets Go to Learn on Etsy.

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