It can be tricky to plan certain activities in your classroom if your students do not celebrate holidays. As teachers, we’re pretty good about planning alternate activities. Thanksgiving is no different. If you have students who do not celebrate Thanksgiving, a great alternative would be a unit based on the Stone Soup story! This article will show you how to add some Stone Soup activities to your writing centers!
Why Use Stone Soup Activities At Your Writing Center?
The story of Stone Soup is a fun one for your students to get to know. There’s the aspect of sharing from the kindness of strangers which is perfect for November when you’re teaching gratitude, kindness, and friendship.
But the story of Stone Soup also has a bit of trickery involved! So it’s fun for students to draw their own conclusions about the weary traveler’s motivation.
Stone Soup Activities To Try This Month
When you’re planning your writing centers for kindergarten or first grade, it’s important to add writing activities that your students enjoy. It also helps if they know a little bit about a topic before they begin writing. I always found that if I hyped it up and made my writing centers really interactive, my students would want to write independently… and put a lot of effort into it!
Let me share what my Stone Soup activities look like at a writing center for kindergarten and first grade. I’ll also be sharing some links for where I’ve purchased some items. They’re Amazon affiliate links, so you’ll purchase them at no extra cost to you.
Stone Soup Word Cards And Puppet
I never thought I’d add a puppet to my writing center, but I’m so glad I did. In fact, students LOVE puppets, so any chance you get to use them, it’ll work wonders!
For this writing activity, students choose a card, write about the topic and feed the card to the hungry puppet. It’s a little stove, so your students will enjoy feeding all the vegetable cards to the hungry stove.
This helps your students come up with a topic to write about, and they have a little closure when they’re done.
Stone Soup Vocabulary Word Wall Words
Anytime your students are going to write, make sure they have plenty of choices. That way they take ownership of their task.
Add a small pocket chart of vocabulary words, or commonly misspelled words to your kindergarten or first grade writing center. Adding these cards will help your students practice the vocabulary from the story, as well as giving them plenty of topics to write about.
Stone Soup Vocabulary Poster
If you don’t have room for a pocket chart or a word wall, you can always add the words to a poster and have it available at your writing center. I like to put mine in a clear plastic display frame like this one. That way, I can easily switch it out for another writing poster.
Stone Soup Vocabulary Minibook
Writing and vocabulary are so intertwined. If students have a strong vocabulary, they’ll have more words to write. So another option for vocabulary development is using this minibook.
This one has a picture for them to color, as well as bonus handwriting practice. But you can also make your own by writing the words on several pieces of paper and stapling them together. It really doesn’t have to be super fancy, that way your students can write the word and draw a picture as well.
The next set of Stone Soup activities are digital resources that can be used as a stand-alone activity or with a paper and pencil for your students.
Digital Vocabulary Slides
I’m sure you see a trend here, vocabulary is important. For your struggling readers, improving their vocabulary will help them with their reading and writing. In this example, students can use these slides as a prompt to write words or sentences about each part of Stone Soup.
Your beginning writers may just copy the words, and that’s okay. We want it to have meaning for them, but they want to be successful. Your students who are ready can look at these slides and use them as writing prompts to decide which part of the story they’d like to write about.
Boom Cards And Google Slides At Your Writing Center
I’ve been using Boom Cards and Google Slides a lot lately. Students love them and it’s a way to make writing fun and interactive. Of course, you’ll want a pencil in your students hands as much as possible, but it is the digital age, so learning to write on a device is important too. Just make sure that it’s not the only way. So use this with your Stone soup activities, it’s up to you if you’d like it to be a stand-alone activity or blend it with a paper and pencil task.
Benefits Of Using Seesaw For Independent Writing Practice
I’ve been a Seesaw user for years. I love how versatile it is. One of my favorite things to see is when a student’s families see the work they’re doing in class and they can comment and communicate DURING the school day! In this case, I made really fun Stone Soup activities where your students will hunt for the word and write it in the box. These hidden messages really make it fun to find the word and write it.
And again, my philosophy about technology in an elementary classroom is that I’d love to see a device in one hand for assistance if needed, but the other hand is writing with a pencil.
Have Your Students Used Spinners At Their Writing Station?
How many times have you heard your students say, “I don’t know what to write about?” So I put topics on a spinner. It’s really easy, and all your students need is a paperclip to spin around.
Or if this is too cumbersome for tiny hands without fine motor skills, you can place these transparent spinners right on top and they can spin their hearts out.
Here’s my funny rule about spinners. Many times students will spin until they get to the word they want. So I’ll let them “cheat” a little and they can push the arrow or paperclip to the word they want.
My goal isn’t to see if they can land on a specific word, my goal is to see my students write about the topic. So I allow a little flexibility with my spinners. I tell my students, if you see a word you want to write about on your spinner, you can absolutely see if you can land on it. But if you don’t you can push it to the word you want. It’s just a fun way for students to choose a writing topic.
Writing Center Ideas: Letters And Lists
In a kindergarten or first grade writing center, you’ll want to add different writing activities. Letter writing is great, your students can write to the traveler in the story Stone Soup and give him advice on what to do next time. Or they can write to a friend and tell them all about the funny story of villagers sharing all their veggies.
List making is great for beginning writers. It’s not a daunting task, or an overwhelming blank piece of paper. When used with all the vocabulary support you’re going to offer at your Stone Soup writing center, even your most struggling writers will feel successful.
For this task, a list of ingredients that go into the soup would be a fun Stone Soup activity.
Find Color Write, A Versatile Writing Activity
Your students will really like this activity. It’s interactive even for a one page worksheet. Your students will find the word on the page and color it. They then have the choice of writing that word, or challenging themselves to use this word in a sentence.
Differentiation At Your Writing Center
Your students are not one size fits all, and your writing center shouldn’t be either. These different types of activities can be used for your students who are just beginning to write words. They can also be scaled up to reach those students who are ready to write sentences or paragraphs.
Adding these structured activities will help them with the “blank paper syndrome” where they are staring at a whole piece of paper wondering what to write about.
Also, giving your students the choice of writing tasks that they will be successful doing will help them learn to love writing. When your students are writing first grade words and full sentences, you’ll be amazed at how proud they are.
Get It Here
If you’d like to purchase these Stone Soup activities, this is where to go! Everything is either low-prep or no-prep, so you’ll be saving so much of your precious planning period. Your students will love the different activities, and you’ll love seeing them motivated to write!
