Stone Soup

Stone Soup is a story by Marcia Brown with a valuable moral: help one another and the final result will reap its rewards.  The collaborative process is a necessary one because not one human being is the same.  We all bring something new to the process.  For this activity, my group mates and I all brought unwanted materials for the purpose of creating a design.  The first moments were rough as we didn’t know where we wanted to go with this, and what we wanted to construct.  As we gathered our materials and looked upon our site of proposed construction, we decided to use the tree as a mechanism in our design.  The lamp I brought was going to serve as the beginning of our piece, and it was going to emit a spiral around the tree.  We also created paper bouquets that spiraled around the base of the tree to further implement the idea of circular motion.  Glasses were used to represent the humanity of recycling and to bridge the gap between nature(the tree) to human consumerism (lamp, glasses, etc.).  We also thought of a creative way to bring a human presence with the materials we had gathered.  We had a medium sheet of aluminum foil and placed it over my face.  Once that was done, my classmate pressed down on all the imprints of my face.  We then attached it to the spiral around the tree.  My favorite part of our design was the lamp that began the whole design was plugged into the tree!!! We added yellow bottle cleaners and construction paper to emit “sparks” from the plug.  That small design was to show that recycling does help power our world.  My group as well as myself truly enjoyed Stone Soup and I suggest everyone give it a try with a few friends.  You’ll be surprised with what you collaborate on and create.