In 1999, the Boquet River Association (BRASS) received an environmental education grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA). This grant was to introduce the raising of Brook Trout and Landlocked Salmon from eggs into middle school classrooms as an exciting adventure in environmental studies. The fish, once raised, would be released under stocking permits following a general study of watersheds and rivers and a more intense look at local river issues.
BRASS built upon a previous interdisciplinary middle school curriculum titled Adopt-A-Salmon Family (AASF). The AASF curriculum was developed in 1993 by a consortium of persons from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in New Hampshire, the New Hampshire/Maine Sea Grant program, and the New England Salmon Association. The curriculum, which uses the Atlantic Salmon, is now used in over a hundred schools in the Northeast. It is organized around monthly themes with a pre-prepared newsletter for student use, but also contains a teacher's guide, vocabulary, activities/demonstrations, references/resources, and an Adopt-A-Salmon Family web site.
To make the AASF curriculum useful to our schools, BRASS made changes and additions. The salmon in our area are Landlocked Atlantic Salmon, not Atlantic Salmon. Our watershed history and pattern of land uses differ from the coastal northeast. Because some river sections do not support salmon, we added the study of Brook Trout. And, because fish habitat degradation is a greater local problem than water quality, new materials on habitat were developed.
The Fish & Wildlife Service maintains the Adopt-A-Salmon Family web site with materials related to the curriculum. However, their curriculum guide is not available on this site. In order to allow teachers and students to make the best use of our new materials, and/or to encourage you to create materials specific to your region and fish you'll raise, we included some of the core materials from the AASF curriculum guide.
This allows material we developed to be viewed in a wider context, and allows those who do not have the AASF curriculum to use our material as a "stand alone" manual. We do stress that there is much valuable additional material in the AASF curriculum guide.
The attached page ADVICE raises some questions you might consider as you evaluate the practicality of raising fish and adopting/revising the curriculum. The page LANDLOCKED SALMON is for schools that want to modify the USF&W curriculum and take advantage of that fish's wider geographic availability. It does not include the new material we created on habitats. The final page takes you to a site map for our curriculum which includes material on both BROOK TROUT AND HABITATS. It is laid out as a monthly calendar of topics for the school year. Please note, the calendar is for the Northeast and for raising salmonids. You may wish to revise the calendar.
In order to easily downloaded and print pages, we have formatted it as black type on white background. Depending on the way your printer is set up, you may need to print with the paper in the "landscape" orientation.
Thank you,
The Boquet River Association
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Please note: "Althought information presented by the Boquet River Association has been funded wholly or in part by the United States Environmental Protection Agency under assistance agreement #NE 982068-99-0, it may not necessarily reflect the view of the Agency and no official endorsement should be inferred." |