| The story of Stephen lends itself particularly well to crafts involving stone. This craft is a responsive craft – that means that the pile of stones should be left out as a visual reminder to the children and referred to during the story, perhaps by the storyteller picking one up and examining it during the relevant part, or by leaving them in a pile in the middle of the children’s story circle. |  |
To start the craft have each child choose a stone and sit examining it for a moment. Perhaps get them to describe the stone they are holding – is it beautiful? Have them imagine how it would have felt if that stone had hit them like the stones hit Stephen. The stones that hit Stephen were ugly stones, stones of hate and fear and anger, tell the children they are going to make their pebbles beautiful stones, stones of love, peace and forgiveness.
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There are many ways of decorating stones, you can paint them, use coloured pens, or at dry transfers. All of the way have different results. For this larger stone I chose to emphasise one positive word – Forgive – this was written using a white ink ballpoint pen. The second word came from the sheet of rub-on transfers – blossom. The rest of the stone was also decorated using rub-on transfers. |
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The smaller stone used 3 colours of pens and hand drawn simple flowers, the word came from a transfer outlined in white pen. The top of the stone was then painted with glitter paint and left to dry. I decided not to varnish my stone or to paint on the back, so that the stone could be turned over and would still look like the plain ugly stones that were thrown at Stephen. |
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Notes: – Using stones that fit nicely into your hand make them not too big or heavy for the child, smaller stones are cute but give less space for them to decorate. – look for rub-on transfers in the scrapbook section and split up the page into small pieces for the children. – white ink pens can be costly but tend to last for a long time. – individual letters are the cheapest rub-on transfers, if you want to use these then work out words first! – You can make your own rub-on or dry transfer images by buying special paper from the company crafty computer paper. |
