Maple Syrup
March 23, 2023
Book 1: Lady Pancake & Sir French Toast
Activity 1: Favorite ways to eat syrup graph
Book 2: The Sweetest Season
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This week’s Story Session was inspired by 🍁 Maine Maple Sunday 🍁, which is always celebrated the 4th weekend in March. The sap runs best this time of year when the nights are below freezing and the days are well above freezing.
We started with Josh Funk’s rollicking rhymer, Lady Pancake & Sir French Toast. This one oozes with wordplay and kept the kids giggling. This is the start of a series of many silly food-related escapades, and I have a soft spot for Josh given that he’s also a software engineer. I don’t know how many of us there are who are both software engineers and kid-lit creators. (Shout out to Aimee Lucido - more to come from her 😁!)
Then we did a polling activity where I had kids come up an color in their favorite way to eat maple syrup. When everyone had a turn to share and make their mark, we counted each column, and talked a bit about bar graphs as a way to show amount comparisons. They’re obviously not fluent data analysts yet, but it was a nice way to reinforce that everyone has preferences, practice counting and introduce visualizations and concepts they’ll practice in the future. I’m a big proponent of early exposure to build familiarity and of scaffolding the level of difficulty of a concept to meet the age group.
Favorite way to eat maple syrup graphing activity
Next we read The Sweetest Season by Elissa Kerr. It’s cute enough and perfectly on topic. The rhyme and rhythm are much clunkier than Funk’s work, but we still enjoyed the story and learning fun facts about how maple syrup is made. You need 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup! So much potential here to weave this one into an outside story time paired with looking for maples or lessons for older kids on evaporation, boiling point, ratios, phloem… the possibilities abound.
Most of the kids reported that their families were planning to go to a local sugar shack or farm event to celebrate this weekend so I didn’t feel too badly about denying their pleas to drink syrup. You could easily weave in a taste test or snack preparation activity with this theme though. Yum!
