Sugaring Time

I'm a homeschooling mom and our family makes maple syrup in Michigan. I enjoy finding accurate children's books about the sugaring experience. This is a charming book that tells one family's story of making maple syrup in their sugar bush. The photos are slightly dated, but it is a classic story. I most appreciate that it demonstrates the tight family bonds that sugarmakers can develop working together.

A Newbery Honor book from 1984, this book is framed within a family farm type setting. The process of making maple syrup if thoroughly covered, from the weather conditions leading up to sugaring time all the way to how the maple syrup is graded. I'm not sure how many still use horses or whether there is more technical equipment in use in the family farm setting, but this is definitely a good description of the basic process. Throughout the story, you are following the family, so you have references like "Angie is now tall enough to reach up and put the hats on the buckets to keep out the rain and snow." This makes the book more interesting than a more straightforward just-the-facts description. Every 2-page spread also has at least 1 black-and-white photograph illustrating the text and giving a real feel for the setting. I read this book aloud to my older two children, ages 7 and 5 1/2. While it's not a "fun" book they ask for again and again, they did enjoy hearing it and did learn from it. This book is certainly not a "must read," but it's a nice elective science book for children in elementary school on up.

This book is eminently suitable to an upper-elementary classroom studying the New England region or the economy of Vermont. Step by step, with one chapter devoted to each part of the maple syrup-making process, the black and white photography and clear text leads you through a wintery world of magic. I sat down and read this book cover to cover and then immediately read it all over again, not wanting to leave the peaceful world of the sugarbush (a grove of maple trees). The crisp and snowy wonderland setting does not mean that sugaring is easy, however; it is intensely hard work spread out over a four week time period. Maple syrup is harvested in March, in that break between coldest winter and earliest spring, when the days are above freezing and brightly lit but the nights are still cold. The direct, strengthening light of the sun warming the trees after the vernal equinox gets their sap flowing and it is from this sap that the syrup is made. That part I knew but everything else about this book revealed a world that was new to me, from the exact temperature sap becomes syrup and what happens if you hit too high or too low, how long the sap will last before it spoils, how the syrup is tested, the precise density it must be to store properly, even how old you have to be before your parents let you Really Help (which is, of course, the part most interesting to small children). This is a world where everyone travels by ski or by sled, which is amazing to me; I can't imagine that depth of winter. The text is as warm and delicious as maple syrup itself: "The sparkling sap, clear and bright, runs like streams of Christmas tinsle. They each take a lick and wonder how so much crystal sweetness can come from a gnarled tree older than all their grandparents put together." Close-up pictures of all steps of the process as well as the exact equipment used makes this book as informative as it is enjoyable. A fascinating look at an age-old process, this book is a must-read for any unit on winter, trees, and the magic of nature.