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Students are introduced to a white sturgeon.
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Chris Bare, a PCEI AmeriCorps member during 2008, designed his Community
Action Project (CAP) to get community members more familiar with the
fishes inhabiting Idaho's lakes and streams. His project was
incorporated into PCEI's annual Watersheds Festival at our own Nature
Center.
A large part of the CAP experience involves collaborating with others.
Chris was able to recruit the help of Chad Henson, an Education Award Program
volunteer through the AmeriCorps office at PCEI and an aquaculturist at
a nearby fish hatchery. Not only was Chad interested in helping out, he
also had access to fishes and the gear to transport and display them.
As a result, more than 200 participating fifth-grade students from
Moscow were lucky enough to get a peak at live white sturgeon, Chinook
salmon, and steelhead. Several University of Idaho students from the Palouse Unit of the American
Fisheries Society also responded to Chris's request for help and
contributed their ideas and volunteered their time to the project.
Aside from seeing salmon and three-foot-long sturgeon swimming in front
of them, kids got the chance to see other fishes of Idaho too. Chris had
printed out and laminated a dozen different pictures of fishes that
occur in Idaho, volunteers showed them to the students and taught them
a little bit about each one. Kids were then able to “fish” for the
cut-outs and were quizzed about the fishes as they caught them. Chris
says, “I remembered playing a similar game at my elementary school. We
used the Snoopy fishing poles to dangle a clothespin on the other side
of a curtain, we’d feel a tug on the line, and pull it over to catch
different prizes. I thought it would be an effective way to teach kids
the fish species of Idaho and they would have fun doing it. But, I was
worried that this type of activity would be too childish for these
kids—I was only in 2nd grade when I was playing along with it!” Judging
by the level of enthusiasm and effort the kids were putting into
catching and naming the fishes, Chris’s concerns disappeared after the
first fish was caught.
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A successful angler shows off her yellow perch.
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