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A few years ago, we were reading through the Little House books with my two eldest girls.
I thought I would share a fun project we did with the book.

One of the chapters described maple sugaring time, so one morning I made up a batch of blueberry pancakes and we did a little taste test. I put out several different types of syrup, all the imitation variety-and a bottle of real maple syrup. The kids made a bar graph and we tracked the preferences of everyone over that day. We were actually doing the little house books with another family that year, so that mom and her 4 kids were over for this.
I was very much surprised that all of the children, but one preferred the imitation syrup to the real thing. I guess it made sense, they had all been brought up using imitation and to them, that was what syrup was supposed to taste like.

For science, we also traced drawings of maple leaves and studied the purpose of sap in a tree. For anyone out there in areas where maple trees used for syrup are, you could go out and identify the trees.

Another fun project with this unit study would be the maple candy on snow recipe I mentioned in another post,-Wondertime magazine had a recipe for those of us lacking snow.

To wrap it up, find a poem about syrup time, or maple trees and have the children use it for copywork.
For geography, look on your bottle of real maple syrup and see where it was made, then look up the state on a map. Research which areas produce maple syrup and color those areas on a map.