Hello! My name is Alli Shinn, and I am a Senior Environmental Studies and Geology major. This spring semester I have been continuing my work with the Tri-State Steelheaders Salmon in Schools program. The Salmon in Schools program is an environmental education program that partners with about 20 schools in the Walla Walla region and beyond. In the fall, myself and the rest of the education team visited all of the classrooms that we partnered with, set up their fish tanks, and stocked all of the tanks with Coho Salmon eggs that we picked up from a local hatchery. Over the past few months, almost all of our eggs have hatched and the juvenile salmon have all grown to be about the size of my pinky! It has been really cool for me to watch the salmon grow. However, I think my favorite part about my fellowship so far has been getting to see the joy and excitement that all of our students have expressed when we come in to teach our monthly lessons. Every time I go into one of my classrooms the kids are so excited to tell me all about how their salmon have grown. In addition, the kids often draw on information from our past lessons to tell me about things like the salmon’s life cycle stages or anatomy. It has been really really rewarding to realize that our lessons truly are being received and our students are taking what they are learning into their daily lives.
This semester, my work with the Steelheaders has shifted a little bit and I am now primarily working on curriculum development. My main project has been creating a lesson plan catalog that future fellows or educators will be able to reference when they need lesson ideas or resources. Creating my lesson plans has been a really great experience and truly feels like the perfect mix of fun and challenge. I have been getting to apply many of my strengths in teaching as well as draw on some of my past experiences working in education to inform how I write my lessons. I also find curriculum development to be really fun because I get to think about the lesson all the way from start to finish, and find fun and creative ways to ensure that our teaching goals will be accomplished while still making the material engaging for our students. I just began working on the lesson plan for what might just be the most important lesson of the year… when we finally get to take kids out into the field and help them release the salmon that they have been taking care of for the past nine months! I am really excited to help plan this celebration for our students, and to watch the joy and wonder that I hope they will experience as their salmon head on to the next stage of their lives.
Experiences like Alli’s are made possible by the Whitman Community Fellow Program, which allows organizations of the Walla Walla Valley region to apply for the opportunity to create an unpaid, part-time fellowship addressing some of the area’s social, economic and cultural challenges. To learn how you could become involved, contact us at ccec_info@whitman.edu.