Maple Syrup Pre-Questions
Collecting Maple Sap at your School
Data collection: Temperature, Volume, and Conversions
If you have the ability to collect sap around your school. Take advantage of the ability to track the data as your trees produce sap.
Options:
1. Tap the trees. Show the process to the students while explaining the science and history behind it. Let them catch a drip of sap on their finger and taste it.
2. If you are tapping multiple trees have the students make predictions of how much sap will be produced based on the tree (size, age, number of trunks, etc.)
3. Graph the data over several days. Day time and night time temperatures. Sap productions for each tree. Overall sap production for each day. Make predictions and analyze the results. Discuss the findings.
4. After you have collected all the sap you are going to collect for your experiment. Have students covert the number of gallons of sap into the number of gallons of syrup you would expect to get.
5. You probably won't have the set up or time to boil down all of your sap, but consider using a small electric cook top in your classroom to boil down a small portion of the sap over all or part of a day. Even if it doesn't become syrup, allow some students to taste and compare the sugar content to that of the sap they tasted from the tree.
6. Use the websites listed to find other resources and activities you can use to support your experiment.
Penn State College of Agricultural Science Resources
Maple Syrup - Kindergarten-ES - Penn State Educational Resource Resource
History of Maple Syrup - K-3 - Penn State Educational
Maple Syrup Production - K-3 - Penn State Educational Resource
New York Ag in the Classroom Resources