A Sweet End To Maple Syrup Season

Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of late afternoon could keep the maple syrup farmers of Huckleberry Hill Elementary School from their appointed rounds. At 4 p.m. every day a dedicated group of fourth grade students and their teacher, Rudy Chiti, ventured out through the field behind the school, to the nature trail and into the surrounding woods to collect sap from 17 sugar maple trees.  

The practice is centuries old in Connecticut and decades old at Huckleberry.

Maple sugaring at Huckleberry began in 1987 when fourth grade teacher Don MacMillon drilled holes in the trees behind the school and began teaching his students how to collect sap and make maple syrup following the traditions of the Native Americans. MacMillon and his students kept careful records of their work, including tracking the weather and tallying the amount of sap collected each season.

The tradition is continued by a current fourth grade teacher, Chiti, with the help of parent volunteers, including Heather Berner. In the past, the project was only available to a single fourth grade class. This year, Chiti opened it up to all fourth grade students.  According the Chiti, he never knew exactly which students would be there to collect sap on any given day, but without fail, there were always a few smiling kids ready to get to work.

The Maple Sugaring Club is a hands-on, multi-faceted educational experience for the kids, giving them the opportunity to learn exactly what it takes to make pure maple syrup by doing it themselves from start to finish. They helped put the taps in the trees in mid-February, collected sap daily regardless of weather conditions and kept careful records. They each had a chance to bring the sap home and boil it down into syrup, a sticky task that takes hours to complete.

By participating in this project, the students had the opportunity to strengthen their understanding of math concepts, including percentages and estimation; they learned plant science, ecology, tree identification; they even learned about the Native American origin and history of maple sugaring. All this in addition to learning to work as a team and spending time in the fresh, cold winter air.

As the syrup farming season comes to an end, the taps were pulled from the trees this past week, allowing them to heal.  Due to the warm weather in March, the trees stopped producing sap earlier than expected. Over the past month the club collected 25 gallons of sap.

Finally, the students will have a chance to taste the results of their labor. Their hard work resulted in only a half gallon of pure, sugary, amber maple syrup.

The syrup is plenty to be poured over ice cream for the Maple Sugaring Club to share at a celebration marking the end of an experience they will not soon forget.