News Photo by Julie Goldberg Left to right, Besser Elementary School fifth-graders Estuardo Meno, Dixie Wagner, and Jimmy Henski look at the salmon their class has helped raise throughout the school year on Thursday.

ALPENA — Eighty-seven Besser Elementary School fourth- and fifth-graders will be at Rotary Island Mill on Monday from 9:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. taking part in the Department of Natural Resources Salmon in the Classroom Program.

Partners from the Northeast Michigan Great Lakes Stewardship Initiative, AmeriCorps, United States Fish and Wildlife Service, the Besser Museum, and the DNR will be joining the students to educate them about the salmon and collecting data.

Throughout the school year, teacher Allison Elliott and her class have been raising Chinook salmon and will be releasing them on Monday. Elliott received grants from both NEMGLSI and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Bay Watershed Education and Training Program to help pay for the supplies and equipment needed to take care of the salmon.

“Those grants helped me pay for the supplies and the equipment needed to raise the fish,” Elliott said.

Salmon in the Classroom is a yearlong natural resources education program. Teachers receive fertilized salmon eggs from a DNR fish hatchery in the fall, hatch them out, feed and raise them through the spring. The salmon will be released on Monday.

“They give us guides to teach the students and explain to them why we are raising the salmon and why it’s important to our Great Lakes ecosystem because salmon aren’t native to the Great Lakes,” Elliott said. “It’s a great thing to teach the students.”

There will be stations the students will rotate through throughout the day at Rotary Island. The stations are salmon migration, life cycles, macroinvertebrates, water chemistry, salmon weights and lengths, data collection, and wetlands.

“They’re going to measure and weigh the fish,” Elliott said. “That’s part of their data collection, which I need to release to the DNR after we release the salmon.”

Elliott said her students have loved having the salmon in the classroom.

“They’re always walking by and watching them,” she said. “They know not to touch the tank or disturb them in anyway, but it’s a great hands-on tool for them to actually see in real life a salmon lifecycle.”

Fifth-grader Jimmy Henski said his favorite part about the salmon being in the classroom was setting up the tank back in the fall.

“I liked that we tried to name them all but forgot the names,” fifth-grader Dixie Wagner said.

Julie Goldberg can be reached via email at jgoldberg@thealpenanews.com or by phone at 358-5688.