40 Forever: Stone Soup!

Brown, Marcia, and Robert L. Egolf. Stone Soup: An Old Tale. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947.

A couple of weeks ago I read and told folktales to a group of visiting kindergartners. The children really surprised me with their reactions. I started with one of my childhood favorites Stone Soup about three hungry French soldiers who visit a town in search of a bite to eat. I asked the kids how they could tell it was an old story. I was expecting them to mention that the villagers didn’t keep their food in a refrigerator, or that the streets were made of stones instead of cement, or that they cooked over a fire instead of an oven. Instead, one of the children shouted out “because there were Nazis!” Next I told the class a story from Ghana about Anansi the Spider, and they thought I said “Nazi” the Spider.

Kimmel, Eric A, and Janet Stevens. Anansi and the Moss-Covered Rock. New York: Holiday House, 1988.

It turned out that the children (kindergartners!) had recently learned about the Holocaust. I decided to switch my lesson plans around a bit and told the story of The Three Little Pigs. Afterward, we discussed who was meaner–Anansi the trickster or the Big Bad Wolf. (I left Hitler out of it.)

Galdone, Paul. The Three Little Pigs: A Folk Tale Classic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.