River stone Cairns

“Rock cairns are human-made stacks, mounds or piles of rocks. They take different forms, and have been built by cultures around the world for many different purposes. Cairns may serve as monuments, burial sites, navigational aids (by land or sea), or ceremonial grounds, among other uses”

Suggested books to read :

A Rock can be      author : Laura Purdie

Make your own Inuksuk   author : Mary Wallace

If you find a rock       author : Peggy Christian

How to make a Cairn

  1. Gather stones in a variety of colors, textures, shapes and sizes   This is a great excuse to get out into nature to gather up a rocks for your cairn.
  2. Clean off the rocks with clear water and scrub lightly to rid the stones of dirt and bugs.
  3. Layout the rocks you have collected. For your first cairn, start off small so that you can play with the shapes without a lot of trouble balancing or gluing rocks.
  4. Begin piling up. The beauty of the cairn is in the balancing of the rocks. A natural cairn is usually built in place and not moved therefore no gluing is needed.
  5. If necessary, use hot glue, white glue or crazy glue to spot glue stones if you want to move it around.

If you would like to bring your cairn to the library so that we can display them, you will need to glue them together.

You can send us photos of your cairn if you prefer not to bring them into the library and we will post the photos to our web page at wo.basso@4cls.org.

Please write your name and telephone number in email so that I can call if you are a prize winner.

We will be awarding prizes for the most unusual, most colorful and the tallest.

All submissions due at the library by July 18th.