Stone Soup

This week in class we were told to bring in materials for “stone soup”. Stone soup is based off an old folk tale. When I was younger, I learned that it was called nail soup. The moral of the story is that when people work together, they can make something better than they could have individually.

My group brought colorful paper, watercolors, bottle caps, cardboard boxes, glitter glue, markers, stickers, and tons of other stuff. With these materials we brought, we were supposed to make something that used the items. After lots of discussion, my group ended up making a very colorful bus. We covered a box with a lot of patterned paper and some sticks we found lying around. For the headlights we used bottle caps and we glued everything on with glitter glue. We cut out little people and windows and doors from the paper and glued it on. We even had a tailpipe on the bus. Meanwhile, someone was keeping track of time so we knew how much time to budget for. Individually my group members couldn’t have done anything like this. You can’t make a bus from bottle caps, paper, or from a box, but when you combine them, its absolutely possible.

Collaboration is a useful tool that improves whatever you are doing. For example, students need each other to study. Individually one student cannot keep up with a professor’s notes and remember all the details, but when there are multiple people who were in class it is possible. The students could study individually, but if they were studying with a group it would probably go a lot smoother.