A Stone Soup Tree

 A Stone Soup production

Photo by Samantha Schneider

For those who know the folk story Stone Soup, the sprouting tree sculpture above was a temporary creation for a project which encouraged the behavioral philosophies of cooperation and collaboration emphasized in the short story.  Cooperation and collaboration.  These are two fantastic nouns that helped our group's project manifest into a success of recycled goods in one very time efficient hour.  The most inspiring thing that I pulled from this was that our level of communication was almost telepathic in nature.

Upon viewing the materials each person bought, we all agreed with the second suggestion: to make a tree.  We discussed colors, the roots, and basic construction.

Vicky started spray painting the box gold while Tobias and Jose collected fallen leaves to stick onto the paint.  Jose had also tied hemp pieces together by knotting them at the top while Eric and I wrapped the soda bottle in brown paper.  Alice, Linda, and Christine began making paper flowers and  branches.  I then wrapped each string of Jose's knotted hemp to create the roots.  After the roots were connected, everyone began creating small additions.  For instance, Vicky made bird nests and Tobias made leaves.  Our finishing touches were adding the branches, smaller creations, and garnishes to the tree.

What was fantastic was that people did not ask for permission to do something.  It was truly collaborative without authority.  It was a common understanding to let people work and have it all come together in the end.  This is what I mean by telepathic.  A personal example is when I made the roots.  I saw Jose tying the hemp together but didn't know what he was doing it for because it was before Tobias suggested making roots.  When I saw that roots needed to be done, I used Jose's string and began rolling brown paper around each string.  While I held the string, Samantha had come over and checked with me that the strings were going to be the roots.  It's as if we were all communicating without verbally communicating.

My Awesome Group

Photo by Samantha Schneider

It was a great experience to work with my group to create a tree which is representative of many concepts such as growth, development, and connectivity.  In making our little creatures, flowers, leaves, etc. we created a community contained within our tree which embodies what we are doing each class period in our groups.