World Culture for Kids: Vermont

I spent a fair bit of time in Vermont while we lived in Massachusetts, and fell in love with this state’s acres of green land, wide open spaces, and soft rolling hills! They make some pretty incredible cheese and maple syrup there, too – not to mention some of the country’s most popular ice cream! So, when it was time to pick a state for this year’s Booking Across the USA blog hop, I knew I wanted to write about beautiful Vermont, since we had already covered Massachusetts the year before!

My favorite way to celebrate Vermont is by making maple syrup butter – by combining two of the state’s most famous products into a delicious treat! Long-time readers will recognize this activity from an earlier blog post – I thought it was well worth repeating here.

Put your ingredients in a container, seal it shut – we used these Ziploc Twist ‘N Loc Containers (affiliate link). You can add a marble to speed up the process, but the more important thing to do is to not put too much cream into the container. I recommend filling it no more than one third of the way full so that there is plenty of space for the cream to splash around.

The kids love the transformation when the cream changes into butter. Here you can see that two of the containers have made the change, while the third (on the right) is at more of a whipped cream phase:

And here are all three containers, each with their pat of butter sitting in some (mostly skim) milk:

 
You can barely taste the maple syrup in the butter, but it sure makes the leftover milk taste amazing!

Blue Apple Books offered to join in the Booking Across the USA fun this year, since this blog hop works beautifully with their Travels with Charlie series. They sent us a copy of Traveling’ the Northeast, and my kids have really enjoyed looking through this book, learning about the different states and finding Charlie on each page. They were excited to recognize several landmarks from places we had visited while we lived in Massachusetts (including several in New Hampshire and Vermont) as well as on our cross-country drive last summer.

You can enter a giveaway to win the complete set of books below – good luck!

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Follow the links below to book your way across the United States with fun activities for each state!

My family is VERY excited to be returning to Massachusetts for a couple weeks this summer! Where should I take the kids while we are there?

MaryAnne Kochenderfer

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MaryAnne is a craft loving educator, musician, photographer, and writer who lives in Silicon Valley with her husband Mike and their four children.