By Stephen Smoot
Almost any educator will say that hands-on learning often provides the best way for educators to get students excited about learning and also help them to retain what gets taught. Learning that engages as many senses as possible, especially in younger grades, can inspire a lifelong curiosity and even spark interest in a career.
Chris Grimes of Mountain Cajun Getaways, along with his wife Melinda, run a learning workshop for fourth grade students at North Fork Elementary School. In their second year of the program, they partner with Future Generations University to create a learning experience that teaches much more than making delicious syrup from sap.
“This is their baby,” Grimes stated, saying they were happy to play a part.
Melinda Grimes is both a former teacher and an active volunteer who often serves at NFES.
The Grimeses tap the tree and extract 25 gallons of sap. Students take the sap and, as Grimes describes, “They put it in two smaller kettles to heat the sap, then put it in one larger one” to complete the process of transforming sap into pure maple syrup.
It takes several days of patient work to distill syrup.
One of the more promising trends in education during the past decade has come to be a rise in use of multi-disciplinary approaches to learning.
The project includes a class assignment to read the Newberry Award winning children’s novel “Miracles on Maple Hill.” Geared toward readers between third and sixth grade, the 1950s era work, as “Bedtime Book Review” shares, tells “the story of 12-year-old Joe and 10-year-old Marly, a brother and sister whose father (Dale) has returned from the war and seems to be suffering from PTSD.”
“Miracles of Maple Hill” is remarkable in that it deals head on with a subject still not oft discussed in the 1950s, the mental and emotional toll taken by war on the soldiers who serve in it. In the time in which this book came out, each living generation of Americans had many who faced significant combat, from the Spanish-American to the Korean War.
The healing power of moving to the country, working on restoring a family property, and using the production of maple to restore a serviceman’s family after a long and difficult deployment also mirrors much the mission and purpose of the Grimes family’s Mountain Cajun Getaways as well.
Learning beyond making the product did not stop at the assigned reading. The Grimes family used a new set of taps this year and taught the students how to gather data and chart its points. Students learn the basics of how to use data in scientific experimentation, learning the scientific method along the way.
“In a couple of weeks, we will have them over to the sugar shack to start bottling,” he said. Of course, the class will get to enjoy the product of their labor with a pancakes and sausage meal.
Two quarts of the finished product will be auctioned off for a school fundraiser at Fall Fest.
Grimes shared that the students are “very thoughtful” and sees the work as “an investment in the community” in that it “takes kids, gets them out of the classroom” and engages them in a different way to learn.
And also “show them something they may not even know.”
