Adventures with Salmon

  NVOS teacher Garry Cotter points out interesting facts about salmon as the Grade 3 class from Garibaldi Highlands Elementary look on.  Photo by Dawn Green

Salmon in the classroom project embraces the Outdoor School

By: Dawn Green green.freelancewriter@gmail.com

The excitement in the air was tangible as the schoolchildren giggled and squirmed as they grouped around the fish trap. Their teacher, Mrs. Heikoop, clad in hip waders, scooped up a salmon and passed it around so the children could experience touching its moist skin. This was simply one of the many hands-on activities the Grade 3 class from Garibaldi Highlands Elementary School experienced during their visit to the North Vancouver Outdoor School (NVOS) in December 2011.

NVOS teacher Garry Cotter led the field trip and explained that it was thanks to a grant from Rob Bell-Irving, community advisor for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) that Squamish schools were able to partake in a salmon study at the school. The Salmonoids in the Classroom program by DFO provides aquariums and salmon eggs to the schools. Each aquarium is sponsored by a teacher, who monitors the salmon eggs’ growth from eyed-egg stage to alevin and eventually to fry stage. Once they are at the fry stage, the schoolchildren release them into one of the salmon streams near their schools.

This was the first year that the Squamish schools were able to include a hands-on visit to NVOS to enrich the project.

“The main objectives of the program are for the children to have a direct experience to see salmon spawning and learn where the eggs that will eventually come to their classroom come from,” Cotter said.  

Seven classes attended the site visit to NVOS from Squamish and each two hour session consisted of a visit to the school’s fish hatchery and a salmon habitat walk along the spawning channels. Here the children witnessed spawning in the streams and saw evidence of bears and eagles scavenging off the salmon carcasses. A few of the groups also had an opportunity to collect eggs from a female and fertilize them with milt from the male salmon.

Bell-Irving says that the role that NVOS plays is a vitally important one, not only in a local, but also a global context.

“ The NVOS is truly an international standard setting education facility teaching ecologically-based science and community-based instruction,” he said. “NVOS is so important; its curriculum, may indeed, be significantly responsible, for preparing numerous generations of young Canadians, to face global ecological challenges, during the 21st century.”

Very few other students in BC receive this opportunity, he explained.

“It's only the close proximity, of NVOS's unique capability to provide such a benevolent natural location; in a practical instruction set-up - that enables the Squamish schools, to receive this special education,” Bell-Irving said.

Cotter said he believes the program was a great success, adding that the teachers appreciated the hands-on learning opportunity that provides a context for what they will be doing with the salmon in their classrooms over the winter and into the spring.

“It makes learning in the classroom more real as the children will have direct experience of seeing where the eggs come from,” he said.

The teachers agree.

“I t was a great afternoon,” said Janet Kindree, the Grade 3 teacher from Garibaldi Highlands Elementary, “and it gave the students some great background knowledge to begin our study of the life cycle of the salmon.”

She said the children in her class were very excited about having the salmon eggs in the classroom and having the experience of raising them and then releasing them back into the creek.

And judging by the flurry of eager questions and ear-to-ear smiles on the children’s faces as they peered in at a bucket of freshly fertilized salmon eggs, they too completely embraced this unique experiential learning opportunity.