When Samantha contacted me about story stones, I was very keen to do a collaboration with her. As a teacher, I was excited to use this as a resource when teaching my class about creative writing.
I designed a lesson around superheroes and Sam sent me a bag of beautiful story stones that were theme-based. I first spent a lesson explaining how to set out a comic strip and we looked at various examples of different cartoons in books and online.
I then explained that everyone would pull a story stone from the bag and they had to think of a creative way of incorporating their stone into their cartoon. The kids were so excited to choose a stone from the bag!
I found that by including a concrete setting or character as a story-telling prompt, the children were inspired to produce creative writing they wouldn't normally have considered. They carefully studied their stones and created amazing cartoons of which I was very proud.
Story stones are not only for older children, they are useful for developing imagination and the basic foundations to story-telling. This can be done as a family (with collaborative story-telling and everyone pulls a stone out of the bag) or as an individual. Use the stones to trigger their creativity!
Here is what Samantha Nel had to say about her business.
My daughter attends a Reggio Emilia school in Fish Hoek and after seeing their classroom makeover last year, I remembered a Pinterest idea for story stones that I’d seen years ago and within three days, I’d made 100 stones for the primary school to use. Everyone loved them and after chatting with a friend who offered to help, “Oh, the stories you’ll tell!” was born.
The world is full of mass-produced plastic toys and so we love that our stones are hand drawn, colored in individually and then placed onto hand painted stones. So no two story stones are ever identical, depending on our colour whims of the day. They have several layers of varnish so as to make them as durable as possible and they’re packaged in an eco-friendly cloth bag that has a cheerful hand sewn fabric accent. It’s a true labour of love!
There’s no right or wrong way. And the stones seem to work for both younger and older children. They work well at home; are a great distraction on long car rides or the inevitable wait for food at a restaurant; they give a new spin on bedtime stories; and they work equally well in classrooms, both for group and individual work.
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