Salmon Returning

We spent Monday learning about Salmon at home.  October even created a play/show regarding the migration of salmon from ocean to their spawning grounds.  It was really a cool day for homeschooling.  We watched a PBS DVD on Salmon here in the Northwest…I think I was more into it than the kids.  We read a couple of books and then October started drawing a female salmon laying her eggs in a gravel bed.  That’s when she came up with the idea to make a “show”.  I guided October through what the lines could be and through this I could have Scarlett ask her fish character why October’s fish character was returning to her stream, how she knew it was her stream and what she was going to do when she got there.  It was really a great way to reinforce what we learned in the books and on the DVD.  I never would have thought to create a show.  A coloring worksheet or glue & paste the salmon life cycle in the correct order would have been more of something I would have thought of but letting October take the lead and us run with it was really cool.  We spent 3 hours working, reading, and watching about the salmon.  Then yesterday, between Scarlett’s dance lesson and October’s gymnastics lesson we went to the Issaquah Fish Hatchery and saw the salmon already beginning to run.  It really is quite impressive if you’ve never seen it.  Large salmon seemingly just hanging out in the stream while others jump completely out of the water and work their way through the fish ladder and then others still that have already died and are littering the banks of the stream.  We even got to see a few biologists in the river that were recording data on the fish such as length, age, gender and when they ran across a female that hadn’t released her eggs we saw the biologist cut open the belly and release all of the eggs.  It was pretty cool.  I plan to go back next week to see how many more salmon are running.



Can you see the salmon jumping in this picture?



Watching the salmon swim by in the fish ladder and jump completely out of the water.

Some splashes were large enough to make it over the top of the tank and splash us.

The girls using the interactive salmon migration display.