Nothing like a 40-50 degree day with some rain to show us that it is almost spring time! The rain never stops us from having a blast. In the morning to keep us moving outside 34 maple leaves we hidden around the yard for us to find. They were various maple leaf colors, such as red, orange, green, etc. It took some time, but we successfully found all of the maple leaves!
Before we headed out on our adventure for the day we did a little project inside. To welcome spring everyone created their own Signs of Spring scavenger hunt that we will use in the weeks that come. We discussed in our table groups what some signs might be, like rain, puddles to jump in, new green grass growing, longer sunny days, spring ephemerals, etc. It was so great to see everyone working and writing what they could on their papers. I cannot wait for us to use them in spring time.
We then journeyed down to Beaver Pond. Before we got there, we all made a prediction of what the pond situation would be like and why. Some of us thought that since we had some cold weather earlier it would still be frozen but not thick enough for us to walk on, others thought that the edges of the pond would be melted but there would still be ice in the middle. When we got there, we saw that the edges of the pond were indeed melted and the ice was only about 1 inch thick in some areas, in others it was less than that. Some else we saw that we didn’t predict were the little streams of water running from the hillside down to the pond of melted snow and rain water. We spent some time exploring this space, making other trails for the water to travel in, and even trying to stop the water from slowing into the pond by building dams.
We then walked to the sugarbush for a fan favorite maple activity, The Gallon Challenge! In once section of the sugarbush there are a number of gallon jugs spread out, our challenge was to find them all, without knowing how many we needed to find. I set a timer and once the group thought they found them all i would then stop the timer. It took the group a little over 6 minutes to decide they found all the gallons. Together we sorted them to make counting them all easier. We broke them up into groups of 5 and all together counting by 5’s we counted 40. Then we discussed the importance of 40 during sugaring season. It takes around 40 gallons of SAP to make 1 Gallon of maple syrup. Also for the sap to flow we need a freezing cold night and then a 40 degree day to collect that sap too. 40 is an important number for sugaring.
After we enjoyed lunch we warmed up by coloring some birds of the sugarbush coloring pages. These are birds that live in different areas of the forest, like high up in the canopy or on the forest floor, that we manage our sugarbush for. We want a diversity of trees and habitat within our sugarbush to welcome different birds and other insects and animals.
When we went outside, we checked the weather/snow board to see no snow on it at all! After that we journeyed into the woods to build some leprechaun traps that we plan to check next week.
We cannot wait for spring to come to Vermont!
