Today was the FOREST program’s first-ever Maple Fest! And boy, did we celebrate all things sap and syrup. Last week, we made wooden taps for collecting maple sap, and today we reaped the rewards by collecting several gallons of the sweet stuff. Our friends the Woolly Bears also tapped some maple trees this month and brought their haul to the festivities. We even had a few students bring in sap they had collected from home! We set up an evaporator and kept filling it and filling it and filling it. In total, we must have evaporated at least 20 gallons!!!
It was a beautiful early spring day. We began the festivities by joining in a circle around the fire and said some words of gratitude for the trees. The Woolly Bears taught us a song about sap and tapping trees and then it was time for games!
There was an Egg and Spoon” relay race in which the FORESTers and the Woolly Bears partnered up and helped each other out, then a big game of Tug-o-War, followed by awareness games. Some students broke off to tend the fire and to prepare snacks of pancakes and maple popcorn. We had a dedicated pancake cooking crew that pumped out scores of delicious silver dollar pancakes for everyone!
When we had eaten our food, it was time for the sap sipping, which turned out to be more like syrup sipping! We had boiled down enough sap for everyone to have a generous cup of high-test “almost” syrup!
In parting, we shared some gratitude once again and sent the Woolly Bears on their way with a bucket of ashes to sprinkle near the trees that had been so good to us. Ashes are a great fertilizer, and an easy way to give back to the forest that offers so much to us.
After lunch, the FORESTers gathered two buckets of spruce cones for our afternoon game, and we went for a hike to a great location for a game of Jays and Songbirds. This game paired students off to build a hidden nest in which to collect the Spruce Cone “food.” The buckets were placed out in the woods as a larder, like a bird feeder from which to gather. Unfortunately for them, it was not an easy task to fill up their nests, since the staff (who played the part of the nest-robbing Blue Jays) were raiding them. To make matters more complicated, a hungry Coopers hawk was hunting both Jays and Songbirds. It made for a good game of strategy, stealth, swiftness, and trickery! We are in the process of ironing out all the subtleties of this game so the kids may be hard at work over the next week thinking about ways to tweak the rules a bit for maximum challenge and fun. They already shared a lot of good suggestions!
To wrap up the day, we hiked to the Sugarbush over by Grandmother Maple and did a Sit Spot: a solitary, silent, sensory meditation of sorts in which we encourage the students to tune in, feel, listen, and observe deeply the rhythms of nature. They took a handful of ashes out with them to offer to the forest and we had a pleasant moment where everyone was connected. The forest breathed, the stream babbled, trees creaked, and leaves tumbled. All the students melted into the landscape for a time … peaceful and serene.