Trout in the Classroom

Trout in the Classroom

Summary of primary activities and lesson plans for the 12 classrooms during the 2009-2010 school year is a prelude to the 2010-2011 school year.

Our primary goal for Trout in the Classroom is to help students learn about water quality, the trout life-cycle, the foods they eat, their part in the ecology and food chain of cold water streams, stream conservation efforts and the importance of our cold water resources. Our long-term goal is to have the students understand that urban communities are connected to and dependent upon their watershed.

The most exciting two responses from students is the day they get the eggs from the fish hatchery and the day they release the trout they have raised from eggs to fingerings into a new cold water stream approved by Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources. The aquarium is the student's lab and while it is not a stream, we try to make the classroom environment as much like a stream as we can. While the students are raising their trout, some die and they want to know how to prevent that from happening. That's when they begin to learn about water quality and with that, they get a strong sense of responsibility to make the right decisions about how to preserve their fry.

The students learned that "What Trout Need" is safety, food and comfort from a story written as an introduction to Trout on a Fly by the venerable Lee Wulff. They observe the trout's eye is on the side of their face and when asked why, a response came from a student that surprised everyone. "It is because they are prey". Yes, trout are both predator and prey so they have to balance their search for food with safety. One student noticed that every day the alevin yolk sac was shrinking in size. He asked his teacher why and what would happen when it is gone, would the fish die? The teacher brought the class to discover that observance is the first step in the scientific method.

Keeping a Trout Journal helped the students write and draw their observations which including measuring the temperature, pH ratios, ammonia ppm, nitrites ppm and nitrates ppm to determine if the tank water was safe. We had a classroom where some of the disadvantaged students didn't write. They had never written anything. So the teacher simply told them to draw what they observed. As they did that, some of the other students began to draw as well as write in their Trout Journal. Before the school year was over, all of the students were writing and drawing in their Trout Journals.

Another lesson cited the Sacramento River where 850,000 Coho Salmon used to spawn. Now they are all gone. The students learned that the fertilizer used on the crops in northern California was ammonium nitrate, which is also an explosive. When the fields were irrigated, regardless of the rain they got, the farmers wanted to keep their water quota from year to year so when the water laced with fertilizer drained back into the creeks and streams which flowed into the Sacramento River watershed, the result was an estuary laced with fertilizer, ammonium nitrate, the same as that experienced in their classroom aquarium. Therefore, water changes are necessary to keep the trout alive. The King salmon are still coming back to the Sacramento. The Coho salmon couldn't spawn in polluted waters, so either they found another stream further north in Canada, or in the Columbia River system between Oregon and Washington.

The students learned about the external trout anatomy while solving a crossword puzzle or drawing and painting trout. Some schools dissected trout with a lesson on Internal Trout Anatomy. Possibly the most exciting lesson was about aquatic macroinvertebrates. They learned that trout survive on many of these insects that populate the cold water streams, and several macroinvertebrates are the nymphs and larvae of mayflies, stone flies and caddis flies which are very good indicators of good water quality.

At stream side, some schools were engaged in constructing a mock K dam for stream restoration. Others practiced casting a fly rod which is different from bait or spin casting because the fly is practically weightless. The fly line, however, has weight and pulls the weightless fly through the air to its target. Many were shown flies tied by Trout Unlimited members so they could judge how they matched the nymphs and adult mayflies, stone flies and caddis flies they imitated.

At stream side, before the students released their trout fingerlings, they collected macroinvertebrates in nets and counted the diversity and the different order and family of insects found to rate the stream's water quality index. In almost every case, the index was between 22 and 24. The students understand how trout and the aquatic macroinvertebrates they feed on are an indicator of water quality and now they begin to understand how urban populations are connected to and dependent upon their local watershed. The point we, as instructors, try to make is that we are neighbors to those in our watershed whether upstream or downstream. This helps them begin to ask the right questions about our environmental stewardship of this planet we call earth. David Brower said, "We don't inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children." After all, the students are our future.

Know of a school who would like to use Trout in the Classroom as one of their environmental education programs? Would you like to participate as a mentor for a school? If so, please contact: Don Thompson via email donlesterthompson@gmail.com or call 859-552-4081 Cell.