WDS has entered maple syrup season! Elementary science students will be taking advantage of the school’s spectacular campus over the next month as they collect sap from maple trees to turn into syrup. This week, several classes ventured out with Ms. Shapiro to tap the trees. They used a large drill to drill a hole in the side of the trees and then hammered in a “spile,” which is a metal spout from which the sap runs out. They attached buckets to the spiles and watched the sap start to flow! The students got the chance to taste the sap, which tastes mostly like water with a faint bit of sweetness. Sap is mostly water, so it must be boiled down 40 times its volume to create syrup. That means they have to collect a LOT of sap to make enough syrup for pancake lunch. The trees that make the sweetest sap are sugar maples, but WDS actually only has one sugar maple close to the school buildings. The rest of its maple trees are Norway maples. They also make sap, but it’s less sweet, so it actually has to be boiled down 60 times its volume. The WDS campus now has blue buckets hanging on all its maple trees!