Stone Soup
Grade 2 · Longer stories
Stone Soup
Retold by PlayOwl from the traditional European folk tale
Milo is hungry, and every door in the village is shut. Then Grandma Rosa takes a stone from her pocket. "We shall have soup," she says.
- 15 pages
- 837 words
- Medium read
- Retelling
For grown-ups: what this book practices, and where it comes from
What this book practices
The old European folk tale in new words, with short paragraphs and plenty of dialogue to read aloud. A funny, warm story about sharing: a clever grandmother and her grandson get a worried village to cook, eat and sing together.
- Level
- Longer stories: Short paragraphs with plenty of dialogue
- Phonics focus
- long o (oa, ow, o-e), ch and tch, soft c
- Themes
- Folk tale, Food, Community, Humor
- After the story
- A short activity checks understanding, then a prompt to tell a grown-up about the book.
Levels are PlayOwl's own design guidelines for each grade, not a certified reading level. In I'll Read, PlayOwl records that a child turned every page; it cannot hear whether the words were read.
Credit and rights
Retold by PlayOwl from the traditional European folk tale. Source: Stone Soup by Traditional European folk tale.
The words are new PlayOwl writing that follows a story in the public domain. PlayOwl claims no rights in the underlying story.
- Adaptation
- Retold for PlayOwl in 2026 from the old European tale of hungry travelers who make soup from a stone. The characters and scenes are PlayOwl's own. Nobody is cheated in this telling: the village eats the soup together, and the stone is given away at the end. The tale is folklore with no author and has been told for centuries. Only the well-known shape of the tale was followed. The retelling was not worked from any modern picture book or other edition, and no wording, characters or scenes were taken from one.
- Cover
- Drawn in code for PlayOwl in 2026 with the Read with Olly illustration kit. Original work owned by PlayOwl.
- Illustrations
- Drawn in code for PlayOwl in 2026 with the Read with Olly illustration kit. The pictures do not follow the pictures of any edition or film. Original work owned by PlayOwl.
- Narration
- Spoken by the reader's own device voice. PlayOwl ships no recording. No recorded work exists.
- Text
- Written for PlayOwl in 2026 as a new retelling. Every sentence is new wording, and the travelers (a grandmother and her grandson) and the villagers were invented for this book. Original wording owned by PlayOwl. The underlying story is covered by the adaptation record.
