For our summer RE program, we went back to the old standby of Stone Soup. This story is used a lot, to talk about sharing and hunger and food distribution. Honestly, I used to interpret the story differently - there was this soldier who came along and tricked a woman into giving up all her food, then waltzed off. I didn’t think it was about sharing - it was about stealing!
That interpretation fits the old Marcia Brown version, which won the Caldecott Medal in 1947. I don’t really like this version, but it is a classic, and I was surprised how many of the kids in class recognized it.
For the story without much alteration, I prefer the version written by Heather Forest. This time the travelers seem to have benign intentions toward the townsfolk, and in the end they proclaim that the “secret ingredient” of stone soup is Sharing. This explicit “moral” to the story made it much easier to move directly into a conversation about how some people in our community are hungry, and how we could share with them.
Kallaloo: A Caribbean Tale sets the story in the marketplace of an island, with a hungry old woman starting the soup off with a shell she found. The vendors all donate various bits , and in the end they have a party and share the soup. This was a very enjoyable variation.
Burgoo Stew is another variation that was fun to read. In this version, a “crowd of five rowdy bad boys” search out an old man when they get hungry. He starts a stone soup up, and each boy ends up going back to his mother to “kindly” ask for some ingredient. In the end, they have learned they can contribute and some manners.
Fox Tale Soup worried me, because I pictured the fox tricking the hen to jump into the pot - that sort of fable. But in fact, the animal characters in this story might as well be people - they live in sheds with a collection of vegetables inside, and all are apparently vegetarians. It’s not a very good addition to this collection of retellings.
The Real Story of Stone Soup has a different narrator, as the trickee tells the story instead of the tricker. In China, a lunch break stop turns into a trick as three boys convince their employer that they actually made soup out of stones. It’s mildly amusing, but lacks the teachable moral about sharing, and wasn’t useful for my lesson.
And somehow I missed picking up the version by Jon Muth, so I’ll have to check that out now. It’s highly recommended, and I’m frustrated with myself that I missed it when I was checking them all out from the library.
