Maple on Our Mind

3/7/2026

In (and out of) the Studio with Nina

In the studio we’ve continued working on our Maple Sugaring inspired artwork!

Every group has started glazing their ceramic maple leaves (and some pancakes from the Sunnies!) this week so they’ll be ready to share with you all at Maple Fest next Friday!

The Sunnies have also been writing and decorating invitations that they’ll be bringing home to invite their families or friends to Maple Fest. In addition, they’ve been exploring making maple leaves using cut out shapes and cookie cutters with tempera paint on our gelli plates.

The Upstairs Neighborhood have been making Horace Pippin inspired maple sugaring collages with cut paper, paint sticks, and stamps. They’ve also been making tree ring drawings based on real tree stumps and the information those tree rings can tell us about a tree. Some of the things we’ve learned are that tree rings are closer together when it’s been a dry season and farther apart in wet, rainy seasons. They can tell us the age of the tree and we can see if a tree has had any brushes with fire because the tree rings will show a scar! We’ve been imaging what our Maple Trees are looking like inside- would they show that this year was extra cold? Are their rings close together or far apart?

The Carriage House has continued printmaking- sketching out designs, transferring to our styrofoam printing plates, inking them up and pulling a print! The Carriage House has also been working on making tiny people, trees, evaporators and more for a collaborative modeling clay maple sugaring scene diorama! We can't wait to share our work with you and invite you to join us for maple-inspired art making next week at Maple Fest!

Notes from the Sugar Bush with evan

Our Buckets Are Full!

The length of this week’s note is inversely proportional to the almost torrential flow of sugar maple sap we have had all hands on deck to collect and process in recent days. Seasoned sugar makers like us always smile knowingly when hearing Old Pete (Seeger)’s lyric about boiling and boiling and boiling and boiling all day long, but this year it feels like maybe we should add in a few more recitations of “boil and boil.”

As I write this I am watching over a group of elder “maple interns” helping to (almost) independently run the evaporator for the fourth time in a week – a rate of syrup making unprecedented here at Randolph. While the final volume of sap collected on the tail end of this especially cold winter remains to be tallied, we are surely on track to tie and perhaps surpass our previous records. Just as with the farm and gardens, the ultimate result is not only lots of delicious syrup but also all the learning and experiences we “harvest” along the way. Rather than trying to put it all into my own words I will trust that your kids are coming home with lots of information and enthusiasm to illuminate just why we treasure this time of year and nature-based tradition so much, and we all look forward to sharing the magic with you next Friday at MapleFest. Until then I’m headed back to the evaporator to watch out for burning and keep up the fire! It’s Maple Syrup Time!

From the Field to the Lab

There is much to love about the sugaring process. On top of the list is the practical applications of science and math that arise as we transform sap to syrup. As we have honed our data collection system over the years we have children from ages 3-11 able to record, analyze and discuss our sap production using 1/4 gallon increments.

As we move into the evaporation process, new questions emerge about boiling point, sugar concentration and density. As we look for ways to use our syrup we consider critical questions like, what is the difference between fudge and caramel? At what temperature does maple syrup transform into a solid(read: candy)? I have no doubt that our team of scientists will be able to come up with some tasty conclusions.

Back in the Stacks with Siobhan

The weather has delayed the start of our media literacy lessons, but we have kept busy around the library leaning into something that kids do all the time: ask for information! This time of year tends to require information on some common themes related to kids noticing things in their environment. Some of those themes are animal tracks, maple sugaring, weather, and animals.

After the break, I received a piece of mail from the Sunnies.

The next group of Sunnies that came into the library helped me pick out some resources they thought would help them find the information they were looking for. First, we learned that books about animal tracks are in the A. GET OUTSIDE section. Then we learned that there is a whole bin with books about animal tracking. We perused them together and they chose a few to take back to their indoor classroom spaces.

Maple sugaring books are always in high demand at this time of year by both students and teachers alike. You can find them in A. GET OUTSIDE → MAPLE SUGARING. Our books in this section were kid-curated in 2021 when the Field Folks took on the project of reading all the books the library had about maple sugaring and then also reading lots of books about maple sugaring from the public library. They did book reviews and made recommendations about which books should be acquired for the Randolph Library collection. Here are some of the books from our collection:

This is always a good time of year to get curious about weather events. You can find those in D. NATURE → WEATHER. We are noticing the light changes (D. NATURE → NIGHT & DAY) and temperature changes (D. NATURE → SEASONS → SPRING). We are noticing birds returning and other animal behavior changing (E. ANIMALS IN WINTER).

Carriage house kiddos frequently come in at various times of the day to find books with pictures or photographs of animals in them. Mostly this is so they can do an illustration to go with an article or presentation of some kind. It’s unlikely that we have a book that is solely about the kind of animal that they are looking for. There aren’t any books in the library that are only about tree frogs, for example, but there are several books that are about frogs. This gives us an opportunity to find the frog section (E. ANIMALS → REPTILES & AMPHIBIANS → FROGS) and to use the table of contents and index of the books we find there to determine if they contain a picture or information about a tree frog.

Some of the older kiddos might be up to searching the catalog on the computer using keywords. This would point them toward books in all different sections of the library and requires them to evaluate based on book cover and title whether a book might be useful to them.

All the noticing and questioning that comes so naturally to children creates an opportunity for us to foster information-seeking habits in them. While the first information-seeking step every child takes is to ask a grown-up, eventually we want them to be equipped to seek out information on their own. Learning how to find books within the cataloguing system of the library is one step towards that independence. Another is learning how to evaluate the usefulness of information sources based on book covers and titles, but also what’s inside a book. Rather than giving them answers, we are empowering them to find answers on their own and evaluate sources that might give them the answers they are looking for.

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