The Sugar House Field Trip

The sugar house had steam coming out of the top. That is the water being boiled out of the sap. Sap is a whole bunch of water and a little bit of sugar.

We road the horse drawn hay wagon up to the sugar bush.

We needed tools to tap a tree.

First, we measured to make sure the tree was big enough to tap. You need a tree at least 36 inches around. This means if a child hugs the tree, his hands should not be able to touch.

 

We used a hand drill to make our hole--that's the old-fashioned way.

After tapping in the spout with a hammer, we hung the bucket.

Next, we put the "hat" on to keep out rain water because sap already has a lot of water. We heard the sap drops going into the bucket right away.

We went to the buckets in the bush and collected sap into white collection buckets.

Back at the sugar house, we got to look at the big tank that collects the sap from trees with tubes.

Matt made sure to show us the fire under the evaporator. 
They go through a lot of wood.

A Little Irish Luck

We had a St. Patrick's Day celebration today in preschool. My heritage is Irish and this was a holiday growing up that was full of magic and surprises. The kids learned a bit about the lore of Ireland. We read Jamie O'Rourke and the Big Potato, an Irish folktale by Tomie dePaola.

Before they got to school, the Leprechaun visited the classroom. He's tricky, clever, and whimsical. He left a trail of shamrocks throughout the room, so it was easy to tell where he went. There were some places that had a whole mess of shamrock footprints. We're pretty sure that's where he stopped to do a jig.

He used his magic to turn all sorts of things his favorite color--GREEN. It took awhile for the kids to notice them all. The water in the toilet and the water table were green. The glue for our art collages turned green. The collage materials were all green (yesterday they were many colors). The only markers in the classroom were green. The chocolate chop muffins, grapes, and milk at snack all had a green hue. He even turned the teacher's water green.

He also left a bunch of sparkles in the rice table and he hid treasures in there--lucky green coins. He left us a note telling us about all of his antics. Here it is.

We still followed our regular schedule, but all day long we kept finding more treats and treasures. As we collected the treats, candies in green wrappers, we kept counting and re-counting to find out if we had them all. We practiced counting up past 60 many times today. We figured out at the end of play time we still needed to find 5 more pieces. During clean up, we found four of the five.

At music, one of the kids noticed the last piece of candy was hidden on Beth's ear!! How did that leprechaun manage to hide one there? We learned to do a jig. Beth knew the steps from when she was a little kid. There is a lot of jumping and kicking in place and you have to keep your hands by your sides as you move.

At dismissal, everyone got to choose three treats and a treasure to take home as a gift from the leprechaun.

Kids in the Kitchen

I meant to post this before February Break, but things got away from me. As you know, we made granola with Nancy Shaw, our resident foodie here at the community center. She invited us into the kitchen , which is slowly being upgraded, to prepare granola together.

We split the kids into two groups and each of the groups followed the recipe that Nancy had written on the whiteboard. 

We dumped in the oats, wheat germ, barley flakes, nuts, sunflower seeds, cinnamon and salt.

Next, we added in the oil and maple syrup. 


Then we stirred it all together to coat everything. Nancy put it in the oven and cooked it for 30 minutes. We added the cranberry raisins after the mix was done cooking. This keeps the dried fruit from melting in the oven.


Then we ate the granola. The opinion was unanimous. We all either liked it or LOVED it!


I hope you all were able to sample some that went home with each student right before vacation.