Children's books about maple sugaring
Hello there!
This week’s Ten Titles, never in any particular order:
Math Maker Lab: 27 Super Bool Projects by DK
Luna Loves Art by Joseph Coehlo
Walk This Underground World by Kate Baker
The Ugly Doodles by Valeria Wicker
The Animals Would Not Sleep! by Sara Levine
Grandmother Pigeon by Louise Erdrich
The Rescuers by Margery Sharp (the Disney adaptation of this book terrified me as a child — a little girl being lowered down into a well in a bucket? Yeah, NO. I can’t even watch a clip without my heart pounding — but the book is, of course, supposed to be better)
Friends and Foes: Poems About Us All by Douglas Florian
Swamp Angel by Anne Isaacs
Seven Golden Rings by Rajani Larocca
Mini issue: Maple sugaring 🍁
My yearly phenology calendar (a box of 3x5 cards with the month and day handwritten on each — I am Very Fancy 💅 ) tells me this is the week we start paying attention to our birch trees. It’s usually a week or two more before we tap them, but now is the time for extended daily discussion about the temperature and data from years past and who is going to wash and ready all the equipment we were too lazy to properly clean after last year. We don’t mess with our maples — one of them is sick, two others have been so badly damaged by storms in the last handful of years I don’t want to take anything from them, and also syrup is a process I don’t often have bandwidth for — but we tap our birches every year for water, which is a simultaneously odd and lovely spring tonic and makes me feel, without fail, like we have made it and are going to survive to see green things again.
We got four inches of snow yesterday, yet I know some people have already started their tapping, so in anticipation/celebration here’s a mini-mini-mini special edition on maple sugaring (someone really needs to write a birch book):
The Maple Thanksgiving by Joseph Bruchac (early reader)
At Grandpa’s Sugar Bush by Margaret Carney
Maple Moon by Connie Brummel Crook
Bear Goes Sugaring by Maxwell Eaton III (this is written a bit like a comic book but it’s extremely informative)
Bears Make Rock Soup by Lise Erdrich (this excellent collection includes a story about maple syrup; I reviewed this title in issue No. 24)
The Missing Maple Syrup Sap Mystery or How Maple Syrup is Made by Gail Gibbons
Sugaring by Jessie Haas
Sugar Snow (a My First Little House Book) by Laura Ingalls Wilder
The Sugar Bush by Winona LaDuke and Waseyabin Kapashasit
The Sweetest Season by Elissa Kerr
Maple Syrup from the Sugarhouse by Laurie Lazzaro Knowlton
The Sugaring-Off Party by Jonathan London (it’s rare to find a children’s book about Quebecois traditions so this is especially unique)
Maple Syrup Season by Ann Purmell
Sugar on Snow by Nan Parson Rossiter
Curious George Makes Maple Syrup by H.A. Rey
Almost Time by Gary D. Schmidt
Ininatig's Gift of Sugar: Traditional Native Sugarmaking by Laura Waterman Wittstock
Sugarbush Spring by Marsha Wilson Chall
You could also take a side trip into pancake books 🥞
The Story of Little Babaji by Helen Bannerman, illustrated by Frank Marcellino
Pancakes, Pancakes! by Eric Carle
Mama Panya’s Pancakes: A Village Tale from Kenya by Mary and Rich Chamberlain
Pancakes for Supper by Anne Isaacs (this is a version of The Story of Little Babaji that ends with maple syrup rather than ghee)
Curious George Makes Pancakes by Margaret and H.A. Rey
Hey Pancakes! by Tamson Weston
Read good books and take good care 😘