Maple Magic

A year ago we took a break for a couple of days from our regular studies and did a fun little unit on maple syrup.  This could easily be a one-day unit; ours took two or three because of other things we had going on away from home. We did it during the months that maple sugaring takes place so that as we learned about it we knew folks were actually doing it on the other side of the country. (This did tie in with our Early American History unit we were doing at the time, though.)

You can't very well do a unit on a food item without actually having the food item to sample and experiment with. Real maple syrup is expensive, so I looked for deals ahead of time at discount stores and was blessed to find just what I needed at a great price (TJ Maxx).

I had actually been planning this unit for quite a while having found this fantastic book at a novelty store on a trip for a baseball tournament. Not only is this book chock full of recipes and creative ways to cook and substitute with maple syrup, it is loaded with factual information and history.

A good unit study always has good reading to go with it. For this unit we read Miracles on Maple Hill by Virginia Sorensen.

There are a lot of videos on YouTube showing the process of getting maple syrup from tree to table. The following videos are some that we watched and go in historical order from the Native American way to the smaller family business to full automated production. 

Next we used this informative National Geographic page to do research on the geography of maple syrup, the necessary climate conditions, tree varieties, producers, etc. I printed a blank map of the U.S. and we marked it ourselves using the National Geographic information, made graphs of production, and did some math problems figuring how many gallons of syrup we'd get from _____ gallons of sap. 

If you've been keeping track, this short unit covered history, geography, social studies/culture, science, literature, and math. Arts could be added, maybe something with maple leaves, but I didn't.

The unit could end here, or it could go on into other sugars. We did go on to learn about brown sugar, refined sugar, molasses, sugar cane, sugar beets, corn syrup, the affect of sugar on the body, etc.

This was a fun and informative little unit. But here's a warning:  once you start eating the real maple syrup, you'll never want to go back to fake flavored corn syrup!