Many of my readers have asked me how I know what to teach in homeschool? It’s a loaded question because truthfully I don’t know everything that I am going to teach. While I do have a weekly schdedule and have purchased materials and workbooks for language arts, reading and math I tend to leave social science, Bible and life lessons/skills up to the everyday opportunities that present themselves. Honestly, I pray that ask God for wisdom and direction and every week we tend to cover more material and topics that I would have had if I had planned for it:) For example, there was a science lesson that we gleaned this week from our maple syrup tapping and it was fun and interesting for the kids.

The lesson was simple: We filled up two cups, both with 1/2 cup of water, then to one cup we added a tbsp of sugar. We labeled the sugar cup and put them both in the freezer. Every 15 minutes we would check to see which one was freezing the fastest. We concluded that the water with sugar freezes slower. We learned how this related to the sap in maple trees, how it acts as an antifreeze so that the maple trees dont freeze solid in the winter time!! It was cool and we all learned a little something.

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There are SO many little lessons that we can teach our kids every day, all we need to do is ask the Lord to give us the opportunities and when they present themselves be ok to steer away from the routine and have a little fun. The kids loved the project so much that they wanted to try to put other baking ingredients in water to see how long they would take to freeze:)…interesting how a little experiment can spark such interest and curiosity.

I must admit that I never thought that I would be tapping my own maple trees and bottling syrup but somehow in the past week that is what I have found myself and my family doing. It has been an adventure. AND a learning process:)

We decided to try to tap 10 trees and see what we got, so far the outcome has exceeded our original expectations. After 5 days of collecting sap we have 3L of syrup meaning that we collected approx 120L of sap and boiled it down!! For those of you who dont know how much that it, its a lot!!!

It has been fun to find a natural resource and literally tap into it. I am thankful for this wonderful land the Lord has given us.

Ideally, I would love to live on the land completely, to grow and sustain ourselves is a dream of mine, however we are not quite there yet. Our climate up here in Northern Ontario definitely makes it more difficult! (But we are trying to come up with creative ideas to be self sustaining)

My favorite part of this past week has been watching our kids help us out and get really excited about this new adventure. Judah loves to go out to the trees and collect the sap with us and Mercy is my “most excited” taste tester when we are boiling down the sap:) My husband has been amazing at setting things up, carrying heavy buckets and enjoying the journey with us.

I am convinced that not matter what venture you set out to do as a family that enjoying it TOGETHER is the BEST part!!

May you experience the unity and communion that comes from doing things together as a family!!