Story Stones

February 1, 2017

I had been wanting to make story stones for a long time now. And it seemed to be the right time for me to finally make them and do the activity with my son. The reason being, my little one has started making up stories and narrating them to me!

While on a nature hunt during the winter vacations, we had collected a lot of stones. I soaked them in a tub, full of water, for 15-20 minutes. After that, I scraped off the mud stuck to them with my hands and gave them a final wash in some more water. Finally, I laid down all the stones on newspaper and left them to dry out.

I got out some old magazines, story book with lots of tiny fun pics.

I cut out loads of pics – characters, fruits, animals, objects, house, sun, cloud etc.

Now, with the help of fevicol, I stuck the cut outs to the stones. Make sure that you press all the edges once, as the stones tend to be uneven. Also, I applied a thin layer on top of the pic too. This gave a little glaze to the pic once it dried out.

Here are our final story stones. I made about 25 of them. I chose the pics like this – a house, few animals, 4 kids, a carpet, a car, torch – making sure I had few characters and objects to develop a story

My kiddo gave me more inputs – what more things he wanted to be included in the story stones – police, mom, dad, ambulance etc. 😀

How we used the story stones:

I laid the stones out onto a large tray. Now, I let my son pick stones and tell his story.
Second way of playing with the stones: I let my son pick any five stones and tell a story. (You can change the number of stones according to your child’s age and abilities}.
I became the stone selector and my son the story teller. I gave him a stone and he started telling a story. When my son (the story teller) paused, or was out of idea, I (the stone selector) added a new stone to help him include the new stone in the story and continue.
I read this somewhere, but haven’t tried it yet: Divide the stones into different categories {Character, object, setting} and place them in separate containers. Now, ask your child to close their eyes to select a stone from each container. Tell the story. When the story comes to a halt, repeat the stone selection procedure.