QUECHEE — In a warmly-lit downstairs room in the Upper Valley Waldorf School’s Roberts House, three early-education teachers dance and twirl marionette puppets on a cloth mini-stage to the awe and delight of a pack of small children and their parents.

Another educator sits off to the side and regales this murmuring and excited audience with the narration of the performance, an adapted retelling of the Russian folk story “Masha and the Bear,” in-which the title character, a young girl, outwits a clingy bruin by hiding in a basket of goodies. As the folktale is traditionally told, she tricks the bear by hiding underneath an assortment of fruit pies, but because this story was part of the school’s first annual ‘Maple Fest,’ it was instead a maple cake that saves the day for young Masha.

The artfully-choreographed performance was just one of several Maple Fest activities hosted on the school’s grounds from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. this past Saturday. After the show, the throng of children were sent to collect maple candies from another teacher posted at Lady Maple, a wizening maple tree that shades an adjacent playground.

Where had the teachers learned to move and organize the marionettes so deftly?

“Just Waldorf training,” one of the teacher-puppeteers, Shannon McLaughlin, said. “In class we tend to do a lot of tabletop puppetry, (though) it’s less with the marionette strings because we all need to be together for that, but we do it during school while we’re teaching.”

Inside the school’s main building, accompanied by the intoxicating aroma of maple-cotton candy and live music from a trio of violinists setup in the Great Hall, were felting and beeswax modeling tutorials, an interactive spinning demonstration, maple-cotton candy making, and a “maple cafe” where festival attendees could purchase homemade pancakes and other breakfast food (proceeds from the cafe sales went to a field trip fund for the eighth graders, a sign on the door outside the cafe noted).

Outside, as various groups of kids ran around collecting clues for a scavenger hunt, clusters of parents and attendees taste-tested maple syrup from Reading’s Spring Brook Farm and learned how to tap tree stumps for syrup and even how to boil it.

Each event tied into something the school’s kindergarten through eighth grade programs are learning in class. Jen Brown, one of the puppeteers who also works in the school’s early-childhood education program, said that the third and fourth graders are currently learning how to tap maple trees.

“Most of the events you see here are run by either teachers or parents,” Brown said. “The teachers worked with their classes to put together a lot of the different things.”

Brown said the UVWS follows a seasonal-festival calendar and that the Maple Fest may replace the Winter Fair the school used to have in early December.

“When the pandemic happened, we stopped doing (the Winter Fair),” Brown said. “It’s also just such a crowded time of year, so we thought about when would be another good time we could offer a really big festival both to our school community (and to the wider community and it just seemed like maple-sugaring time was a great time to do it.”

Frannie Koenig, of Hanover, attended the festival with her two toddlers and was in the process of getting them ready to see the 12:30 p.m. performance of the puppet show after having already attended the stump-tapping and felting exhibits. She said the musical performances had both stood out to her and her youngest.

She’d heard from a friend that lives in the Quechee area about the festival and that it was open to everybody and thought it was a good way for the children to spend a Saturday morning.

“There have been some musicians that were really lovely,” Koenig said. “My one-and-a-half year old loved them.”

Ray Couture can be reached at 1994rbc@gmail.com with questions and story ideas.

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