This week we wrapped up our learning on maple syrup and with all of the fresh new snow that came over the weekend, we had to make the most of it. Upon arrival we had a Maple scavenger hunt to complete. This scavenger hunt had us searching for different tools or signs of maple syrup production. There were 12 items we had to find, and we found them all. 

In the morning we went on another scavenger hunt through the sugarbush which taught us about 5 different birds and the different habitats they like. These 5 birds are a few that we use to teach about and look for when it comes to having a Bird Friendly Sugarbush. Audubon Vermont runs a program to assess and help sugar makers manage their woods to be Bird Friendly. This has them look at the different types of trees they have but also how many living and dead trees there are. You can learn all about our Bird Friendly Maple program and what it means for our forest. We read and learned about where the 5 different birds lives, whether it was on the ground in the wood debris, in a standing dead tree, in young shrubs and trees, big tall trees in their canopy, or in evergreen trees. Every bird had a letter corresponding to it in our scavenger hunt and once we got all the letters we needed to descramble them to spell a word. The letters were, P, E, M, L, A, can you figure out the word too? 

Before lunch we hiked up to the barn and looked out for birds. We heard chickadees, redwing black birds, nuthatches, tufted titmouse, and others too. Once at the barn we noticed that porch wasn’t shoveled and everyone wanted to help out and shovel off all the snow! The team work was incredible. 

We went sledding for a while after lunch, and built some snow tunnels too. We saw that the snow was getting to be great packing snow and started to roll huge snowballs. This turned into us making a snowperson class with a pet horse, cat, and 3 headed dog! 

I wonder if this is going to be our last snow adventure of the year!