Making Soup from a Stone?

     We made soup from a stone today!  We read "Stone Soup" by Ann McGovern to the children today about a peasant who is hungry and asks an old lady for something to eat. When she refuses he asks her for a stone and tells her he can make soup from a stone.  The old lady is intrigued and helps the peasant  add different ingredients to the boiling pot of water with the stone.  After a while a wonderful soup is made out of vegetables, barley, beef bones, and butter.  They enjoy the soup together and the peasant leaves happily on his way thinking of his supper tomorrow making soup from a stone!  The children first explored all the different vegetables analyzing each one.  Some carrots with stems were made into necklaces and others were creatively used for body parts! Then the children practiced their knife skills today cutting and dicing the assortment of vegetables for our soup.  They really enjoyed using the variety of knives and practicing cutting the vegetables to put into our soup pot.  Even our little ones enjoyed trying to maneuver a knife and practiced cutting into the soft flesh of some cooked carrots.  They even enjoyed tasting along the way some of the cooked and uncooked vegetables.  We then added some salt, pepper, water, tomato sauce, ABC's pasta, and our stone to our diced vegetables and put it on the stove to cook.  As our soup cooked we played and played and played!  When the children came inside from our snowy wonderland they were ready for some hot soup!  They were very excited to eat our stone soup.  Some of the children had three bowls of soup!  They were very proud of their culinary masterpiece!