What a week. After several days of frosty and snowy sojourns on frozen lakes, my family returned to Randolph with all of their winter gear in tow. A Duckling said to me upon arrival on Tuesday, "It's really crunchy outside today!" Right he was.

The sounds of winter are sharper...somehow more defined than on a hot summer day when all of the blending of crickets and ice cream truck bells and waterparks seem to dull the edges.

Nature is our teacher, our playground and our laboratory. Recently, the frosty temperatures have been creating some intriguing provocations down at the creek in the form of ice. As we explored our environment we discovered that most, but not all of the creek had a layer of ice. Upon further investigation we noticed there was a huge variety in the types of ice we could observe. There was spiky ice, smooth ice, bubble ice, layered ice, cloudy ice and clear ice. Why would frozen water behave in so many different ways? The children were curious and carefully collected and compared a variety of ice samples. Hopefully, we have more  winter weather ahead of us to support further investigation of these questions!

The trees were definitely all asleep this week. As the temperatures dipped and dropped and refused to rise, there was absolutely no chance that the sap was running. But, the lengthening days and the forecast next week have us on alert for sap season. To be prepared for that magical day when the temperatures start off frigid and surge above 32 degrees F we have a lot of work to do right now. There are buckets to organize and clean, tools to collect and trees to measure. This week as children of all ages walked around the campus we stopped by specific sugar maple trees and collected knowledge that the children have about tapping trees and making syrup. Many of the children have strong relationships with the trees we tap year after year. They give them names: Bookworm, Love, Pat Jackson and Snowflake. They recognize the scars from the tap holes they made in the past. And they hold a remarkable amount of knowledge about maple trees and the sugaring process. Rest assured, when the conditions present themselves, we will be ready for maple syrup time again.

On January 11th, Randolph School traveled to Syracuse, New York to present our work at the Mid-Winter Classic hosted by the Cornell Cooperative Extension. It was an exciting opportunity to showcase our singular mixed-age and multi-disciplinary maple curriculum amongst other schools. We were the only elementary school present at the conference and the public was surprised and delighted by the creative and child-centered approach to making maple syrup an integral part of our curriculum. Our presentation area was over-flowing with yarn woven sap graphs, child-made signs for tools, colorful charts and whimsical books that seamlessly represented our imaginations and our undeniable scientific knowledge about the sugaring process. From hand-sewn pancakes for dramatic play to rigorous field science charts that would stand up to most middle and high school science standards our sugaring program is as unique as it is impressive. 

The Mid-Winter Classic is a conference for maple producers across the state to come together and network, attend informative workshops and learn about the cutting-edge sugaring technology that is being developed. 

We were able to sit in on workshops with experts from Cornell and SUNY ESF to learn about when to tap in a time of climate change, how to cultivate edible mushrooms in the sugar bush and ways to use maple syrup in the fermentation process. We left proud of what our school has accomplished and excited to take our sugaring operation to the next level.