Chimacum Middle School Creek Stewardship Project

Chimacum Middle School Creek Stewardship Project helps 6th graders learn how to monitor and take care of their creek. Sixth graders work with the North Olympic Salmon Coalition (NOSC) to learn about their neighborhood creek, Chimacum Creek. Sixth graders learn about biological integrity using benthic macroinvertebrates, they get to plant trees along riparian zones of the creek, and they test the water quality of our creek using probes such as dissolved oxygen, pH, temperature, flow rate, turbidity and nitrates. By 8th grade the students get to trap fish using our creek to identify and count them. Even though the kids would prefer to keep the fish we, of course, return them all to the creek. They catch coho and chum salmon, rainbow and cutthroat trout, as well as sculpin, stickleback and even crayfish. Sometimes we find a stray lamprey in our traps!

Here are a couple of videos describing the main points of this project:

Here's Chimacum Creek:

Map of the Olympic Peninsula, including Chimacum and Chimacum Creek outlined.

Clicking on the picture of Chimacum Creek will take you to a picture where you can zoom in a little closer on the creek. The pin in the middle of the picture is where our school is located and shows where we do our water quality testing.

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Here's the path we take from our classroom to the creek area where we conduct our water quality testing.

It's a short walk to the creek and allows us to do our testing and return to class in one period with time to spare. This allows us to test for several days to get a good sampling of data.

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Here are some kids preparing in class to go down to the creek.

Here are some photos of students collecting water quality data right our site. As you can see this is an area that gets some traffic, albeit not wanted traffic. You can see the probes and the sensor interface they use to collect the data. The handheld devices, Vernier Labquests, take the data and calculates the mean and range for students. One day we also saw a spawner salmon on its last legs. It was still alive enough to avoid us.

Here are some kids planting trees on a property near our school. Our creek runs through many of our families' properties so if the kids learn how to care for our creek they can teach their parents!

Here is an example of what fish trapping looks like for our 8th graders (we use bread for bait and 24 hours later we catch fish!).