Trout Hatchery

Yesterday we went on a field trip to a trout hatchery.  We travelled by school bus.

We even had two of our moms come along.

When we got there we learned a few things about trout and what they need to survive.  We also learned about what we can do to help them survive.

Then we went on a little tour of the trout museum.  We even saw them feeding some of the different trout.

Did you know trout can be all different sizes?

After exploring the trout museum our guide taught us how to map a river. We learned how to make a  legend with symbols to represent the different things we see in the river.

Then we headed outside to the river so that we could map the river.

We came back into the theatre for lunch. As we ate our lunch we watched a Magic School Bus movie about salmon and their migration.

Then we learned about the decomposition rates of different types of garbage. It made us really think about how important it is for us to compost and recycle or things before even considering putting it in the garbage.

Next we played a game about what's worse - what we put down our sinks, or what we put down the street drains.  We put all sorts of yucky things down the household drain like toothpaste, and shampoo and we put yucky things down the street drain too - car oil, washing soap etc.

We learned that what goes down the household drain isn't as bad as what goes down the street drain, but neither are good for the water that we and our fish need.

Our final activity was a little scavenger hunt around the museum.  We didn't have enough time to finish it but it was fun all the same.

Finally we headed back onto our school bus. Unfortunately there is a big accident on the hwy in the direction that we had to travel so instead of taking 40 min to get back to school, we took 110 min! It was a very long bus ride but we made the best of it.  Below is a picture of the accident scene we passed.

Have you ever been to a trout hatchery before?  What did you learn?

PS When we got back to school Ms. Lirenman sent an email inquiring about having the Salmon in the Classroom program happen right here at our school.  Who knows, maybe next year we'll be raising our own salmon.