Another cold morning to welcome us back after two weeks away! Our introductory activity was our final activity centered around patterns and animals. There were the 4 types of animal track patterns out and then 16 pictures of animals, the goal was to match the animal pictures with the pattern they most frequently do. Some of the cards stumped us because we had never talked about that animal like an otter or opossum. We then for one last time practice moving like this animals, bounding like a weasel, waddling like a bear, hopping like a squirrel, and walking like a bobcat.
We planned an action packed day which started with getting ourselves fitted into snowshoes to use through our trails down to the sugarbush. We learned how to put them on and take them off too. We began out hike down learning how to move with our larger feet, it took a minute to get used to them, but we all got the hand of it.
Once we got down to the sugarbush we got ready to tap some maple trees! We practiced on dead trees how to drill a hole with our electric drill before we did it on real trees. We also talked about how to ID a maple tree, from using its bark, the branching, and if there is an old tap scar. We tapped 3 trees alternating drilling the whole, putting and hammering in a tap, and finally hanging the bucket and lid.
On the walk back to the barn we stopped by beaver pond after we discussed what the condition of the pond would be. We all thought the ice would be there, but be thin, and we were wrong! The ice was still nice and thick. The one thing we did get right was that we predicted there to not be a lot of snow on the ice, but for it to have mostly melted leaving a slippery coat. Sadly, we were running late for lunch (hiking in snowshoes takes a little longer than normal) but we hope maybe we can revisit the space next week.
In the afternoon we measured the snow, there was 4 inches on the board after last week. We hypothesized that we would most likely start to not need to measure the snow soon, and maybe need to switch to the rain gauge.
We spent the afternoon enjoying all the slippery snow! We practiced sliding down the snow mounds like otters and penguins and learned that we could create sliding trains too. We also enjoyed some time with the birds, filled the feeders with black oil sunflower seeds and sat in the sunshine watching them visit the newly filled feeders.
We cannot wait to explore more about maple sugaring in the weeks to come!
