Students from Creative Learning Christian School in Mercer learn about the maple sugaring process from Brandi Miller-Parrish, an environmental education specialist at the Jennings Environmental Center in Brady Township on Friday.

BRADY TWP — Making authentic maple syrup, as many local schoolchildren learned during the past week, is a long process.

Jennings Environmental Education Center offered maple sugaring workshops to students in first through sixth grades this week, and a free, public session about the history of maple sugaring begins at 2 p.m. Sunday.

There’s a pretty brief time frame to extract sap from maple trees, about four to six weeks out of the year, said Brandi Miller-Parrish, an environmental education specialist at Jennings.

“We want nights that are below freezing and days that are warm and sunny,” she told a group of students from Creative Learning Christian School in Mercer on Friday.

Walking along a wooded trail on a cold, overcast afternoon, Miller-Parrish also taught the students how to identify maple trees when its distinctive leaves aren’t there — by looking at the shape of the branches on the trees.

Sap buckets attached to dozens of trees around the 300 acres at Jennings also provide a hint.

“Just identifying a maple isn’t good enough,” Miller-Parrish said. “We want the best maple for the job.”

Sugar maples, among eight kinds of maple trees native in Pennsylvania, provide the best maple syrup.

Students also learned about the history of maple sugaring, first done by Native Americans. It was learning about the older processes 11-year-old Jonathan Mohr enjoyed most about the workshop.

“Different technologies were used over the years,” he said. “I liked the old Indian methods of collecting the syrups.”

To make the sweet confection pancakes lovers know well, a long cooking process is necessary. Sap straight from a tree is about 95 percent water, so it’s too thin to be a syrup on its own. Cooking the sap down to the right thickness and concentrate can take as long as 8 hours. And it takes about 40 to 50 gallons of sap to create one gallon of syrup.

But these students had a satisfying ending to their hourlong maple sugaring tour — being able to taste the finished product.

Seven-year-old Noah Morgan was particularly eager to get a taste of locally made syrup. He had also tried a taste of the sap, before the syrup making process.

“It was very interesting,” he said while his face grimaced.