Maple Syrup Time

Maple sugaring is a year-round curriculum, with the most intensive portion of the process happening in the late winter and early spring. Children and teachers worked together in the fall to notice, identify, and label the sugar maples around campus as we learn to see the difference in tree buds and bark structure. We also used maple tree parts in different ways, including our Stick People stories, leaf rainbows, and leaf necklaces. In the winter we hauled wood chips for cozy blankets on tree roots and wondered what maple trees might dream about. We visited Grandmother Maple and Beetle, her neighbor, often, sharing stories and songs. When the temperature shifted, becoming freezing at night but warmer during the days, we knew it was time to begin tapping! Throughout the past few weeks, we have been following the steps from our Downstairs-written song "That's the Way We Make Syrup," as we tap the trees, collect the sap, and boil it down into syrup. We will continue to check in with the maple trees, as their spring leaves emerge and we use our maple syrup bounty from this year in cooking projects. In a spiral curriculum such as this, where students visit topics or subjects again and again over time, students can deepen their thinking and experience complexity as they come back to their learning with new insights and skills each year. We were so glad that you were able to join us for Maple Fest to see the children's learning in action!

Here at the Randolph School, our everyday experiences provide the environment within which learning occurs. In a project-based curriculum, each experience is a piece of the whole and, while the maple sugaring process was happening mainly outdoors, we were simultaneously exploring facets of the experience inside as well. Maple sugaring is an important example of our interdisciplinary curriculum in action. Each project or activity, short- or long-term, has skills interwoven from many of the domains. This creates a real-world experience, where learning happens in context. Humans learn best when they are active, engaged participants in constructing their own knowledge. Below is this year's story of maple sugaring, which picked up threads of previous learning and wove together some of our current interests in fascinating ways.

Drawing on our ongoing exploration of the Olympics, we decided the Randolph trees were their own team, representing Randolph School! Therefore, if athletes and countries get medals, the trees deserved their own medals, too. The Sunnies worked with their Bluebird Buddies to create medals for Grandmother Maple. Before Maple Fest, the two classes removed Grandmother Maple’s winter quilt and replaced it with a necklace full of medals, to celebrate the trees’ accomplishments this mapling season. We also wanted to cheer on the trees during the process, to encourage them to make more sap. A serendipitous gift of a USA pennant from the Kaplan family after a trip to the two-time Olympic host city Lake Placid inspired us to create pennants. After all, what is sugaring season but the Olympics for maple trees?! We thought about what symbols, in the form of stamps or drawings, could represent Randolph School or the maple trees. In addition, children were invited to use letter stamps and a “word wall” to build on the foundational literacy skills that we have been practicing throughout the year.

Another thread we “picked up” involved Cardboard Village, an ongoing loose parts construction project that we had been building over the weeks. Cardboard Village had a few trees already, but the children were interested in adding maple trees and perhaps even a Sugar Shack! We provided loose parts and let the children’s knowledge drive their creations. Previously, we had explored the different parts of a tree, using books, songs, and even our own bodies. We sang “Crown, Branches, Trunk, and Roots” to the tune of “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes,” and we learned the yoga pose “tree” as we familiarized ourselves with tree anatomy. Once every child had made a tree, we built an addition to Cardboard Village in the form of Cardboard Forest, and every tree was “planted” by their creator.  This new avenue reinvigorated our interest in Cardboard Village, which had been laying dormant, so we undertook some repairs and additions, as well as adding a "sky" background. **Cardboard Village and Forest will be on display during conferences!

During maple sugaring time, a natural and embedded curricular connection is math-based, as counting and patterning take center stage. Collecting, recording, and representing data is an important part of this process. Moving from one tree to another to check for sap, we noticed that the buckets are numbered, and we collected data on how much sap is in each tree’s bucket. We introduced the concept of quarters and halves, drawing a connection between quarts and gallons to our very own unit blocks, which have been carefully designed on a fractional (proportional) system. We also visited Grandmother Maple every day during the height of the season, using our stop watches to time the gap between drips. This informational record made us think about patterning, and we used different materials to explore the patterns we could make.

Children could choose between different activities at choice time and playground time to explore different aspects of the maple sugaring process. We had indoor and outdoor water play, as we thought about how sap flowed and its similarities to water in form and movement. Hammering in the spiles on the maple trees prompted us to explore hammering, from little nails on corkboards inside to large stakes outside. While we got turns using the different mapling tools outside, we also had chances to examine them more closely inside, practicing our observational drawing skills and sharing our knowledge about maple sugaring with our drawings and words.