Union Ridge Elementary School fourth graders paraded down Fifth Avenue to Division Street with precious cargo in tow as they ventured into Abrams Park to release young Coho salmon smolt in Gee Creek last week.
On the way, students in Rockwell Fransen, Kim Stenbak and Brenda Benson’s fourth grade science classes learned about trees, native plants, stream habitat and how to identify key features in Abrams Park while they released the salmon into Gee Creek on Wednesday, Dec. 11. The students pointed out key differences between Western red cedar and Douglas fir trees, as well as the differences between evergreen trees and conifers.
Fransen sees the outdoor exploration on the way to releasing salmon in Gee Creek as a great opportunity to take the classroom outdoors.
“Research is showing that getting kids outdoors for lessons, even if you just do the same lesson, only take them out of the classroom and do it outdoors, can help in a lot of different ways,” he said.
Fransen finished the adventure with a quick stop at the school’s garden so students could share their observations with the current state of the garden in its winter phase. The school is also developing an outdoor classroom among the evergreen trees on school grounds parallel to Abrams Park, Fransen added.
The outdoor field trip to release a half a dozen or so Coho salmon was made possible through the Salmon in the Classroom program, an initiative administered and funded by Columbia Springs and Clark Public Utilities. The initiative delivered the salmon in October to the Union Ridge science classes when the fish were fingerling size, Fransen said. From there, the students actively participated in lessons to determine the species that they would release into Gee Creek, as well as what temperature they needed to keep the classroom fish tank and other lessons to keep the fish alive.
For Union Ridge Elementary to have the opportunity, Stenbak spearheaded the idea for the fourth grade classrooms by reaching out to the program, Fransen said.
“They set up the tank for us, deliver fish and give us some lessons for us to do with students,” Fransen said. “So there’s water-quality testing, keeping track of temperature. Once eggs are delivered, the temperature of the water is tracked over time and so we can then do a math lesson where we can predict when the eggs will hatch based on the temperature of the water and how long they’ve been in that temperature of water.”
The salmon were initially a mystery to the fourth graders, Fransen said. The students learned to identify key markings on the fingerling to smolt-aged fish, ultimately concluding that the species they had were Cohos. In January, the classes will get to watch the whole youth life cycle of salmon.
“In January, we’ll get 250 eggs that we will then raise to be quite a bit smaller than the ones that we released today,” Fransen said. “But we will also release them in the spring time.”
To learn more about the Salmon in the Classroom program in Clark County, visit columbias prings.org/salmon-in-the-classroom/.