Tucked away deep in the endless mountains of North East Pennsylvania is North East Bradford School

It is Mid March, the ground hog saw it’s shadow and the weather in, North East Pennsylvania is par. The evenings are in the 20’s and the days in the mid to upper 30’s. To some, the weather in the South West is more appealing but to us living in the North East Bradford School System the weather is “SWEET”. We start our morning with a pancake breakfast…locally processed Maple Syrup is what makes it so sweet.

Maple trees are my unit of the month. When you really take a look at them they are involved in every discipline. In my history section we honored Benjamin Franklin, a Pennsylvanian, who opposed slavery and call cane sugar “Blood Sugar”. Mr. Franklin wanted to ban any sugar processed by slave labor. He was greatly involved in the promotion of Maple Sugar, renewable, environmentally friendly, and most important processed without the exploitation of slave labor. We studied the cottage industries, the timber men and, the furniture makers. In science we discussed the identification of trees, the hardening off of seeds, and the necessity of hard freezes for the germination of hardwood trees, such as maple trees. We discussed tree populations and the environmental influences of the hardwood forests. All of these discussions involved monetary math and linear math.

Talk is cheap… so I loaded my 7th grade students up on the bus and we took field trips to a lumberyard, to the state game lands, and to a maple syrup farm.

The importance of conservation and the preservation of our environment were key themes in my instruction.

After a long morning at the maple syrup farm, the students took a lunch break. At the end of lunch we sat at the tables and calculated the cost of a gallon of maple syrup.

Using these real life expenses, can your class calculate the cost of a gallon of maple syrup?

Be sure to record your necessary data and when you are doing mathematical calculations “Be neat”… Because math is neat!

Assuming the trees, are a gift from the Mother … “Thank you Mother for the gift of your trees”!

The buckets are $1.00 each per five-gallon bucket. How many buckets will you use? It takes 50 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup.

How many trees will you need to tap, if each tree normally yields a gallon of sap per day?

The tubes used to tap the trees are $0.25 per foot. Normally you will need 3 feet of tube per tap. The tree-taps are approximately (~) $0.50 each and tube “T’s” are ~ $0.15 each.

How many taps and T’s will you use if you use only one tap per tree… two taps per tree… three taps per tree? How much tubing and how many buckets will you need?

How many days will it take to yield the sap and boil the sap into syrup? Will you pay yourself for the time you spend tapping the trees, collecting the sap and boiling it down into syrup?

What will you put the syrup in? Do you need to buy a gallon jug for $0.50 or will you recycle a milk jug?

A fifty-gallon drum for boiling the sap is $15.00 plus $5.00 to cut it in half, assuming you do not have the equipment to do the cutting yourself.

A 1/4cord of wood is used to boil 50 gallons of sap for approximately ~ 16 hours, in order to turn the sap into syrup. The cord of wood could cost $60.00 per cord or the cord of wood could be the wood obtained from pruning the trees last fall. If you chose to prune the trees you must convey this in your estimated cost of the syrup.

Some of the students have decided to tap their own trees and make syrup for a class pancake breakfast.

Here are some of the products one can make with maple tree sap.

Maple Cream Maple Sugar

Maple Candy Maple Syrup

Here’s a little FYI. Did you know that one acre of maple trees will transpire 64038.85 gallons of water between the months of May and September?

One more challenge before we go. Let’s go back to the lumberyard.

In the lumberyard one is concerned with board footage. Can you take your students out to the schoolyard and find a tree or two? If so, use the following calculations to figure out board footage.

Board footage is the lumber you obtain from the timber.

Materials:

Tree (a gift from our Mother Earth)

Tape measure

Paper

Procedure:

1.Measure the height of the tree you are studying. (Geometry has a calculation you can use to help you.) What theorem will you use?

2.Measure the diameter of the tree you are studying. Make sure you write these two measurements down very carefully on the data sheet.

3.Remember the formula to find the area of a circle is (A=r2 x pi). Area = radius squared times 3.14). Since a tree is almost circular, use this formula to find the area of your tree at DBH (diameter at breast height). Since the formula requires the radius of the tree and you just measured the diameter, divide the diameter by 2. Dividing the radius by 12 converts inches to feet.

4.Now use this number to calculate the area of your tree.

5.Don't relax now! We are only beginning! Use the following formula to find out how many cubic feet of lumber are in your tree.

Cubic Feet = Area (ft) X Height (ft) divided by 4

(Note: 4 is used to account for the taper of the tree)

6.There are 12 board feet of lumber for every one cubic foot, so multiply cubic feet by 12.

You have calculated how many board feet of lumber your tree has.

In your conclusion write the possibilities of what one could use the bark-covered mill ends for, as to not waste any of the gift.

You guys are good!

Thanks for letting us join you out here on the Math Trail. As you walk the trail of life, you will see how the Mother loves diversity, it is her nature and part of all of us. So I ask you, please, live a good life in the spirit of the Earth Mother for we are, all, her children.

Bobbie Wagner

As Roy Rogers would say, “Happy Trails to you… until we meet again.”