It Started With Trout: How One Vermont Classroom Traced a Year Back to the Land
By Tiffany Bates, Third Grade Teacher, South Royalton School
My grandfather taught me to fish in Orange, Vermont. We went almost every day. Trout fishing outdoors was basically the whole of my childhood, and I never really thought about it as anything other than what summer was for.
So when I started raising trout in my classroom, the purpose wasn't really about the fish. It was about giving my students the same thing I had as a kid: family, time outside, a reason to pay attention to the water. That had been going on for years before I got an email from Hannah, nominating me for the Equitable Climate Action Partnership. I remember thinking, sure, I'll try anything.
Here's what I ran into almost right away. Everyone told me the trout unit was fine as it was. But I didn't feel like that was actually teaching the kids about climate change. How do you teach climate change to eight and nine-year-olds
without them understanding how we got here in the first place?
So the trout became a door into everything else. Glaciers. The land. Sheep. What Vermont looked like before it was farms, and what happened to it after. I was honestly not prepared for how catastrophic some of that history was, and neither were the kids. That turned out to be the point. We went on field trips constantly, so many that one of my students told me she didn't think she'd even be able to count them all. Dairy farms, streams, riparian buffers, a linen farm that processes flax. We learned about the sheep boom, back when Vermont had, according to one of my kids, "more sheep than people." That thread led us into wool, and wool led us into needle felting, which is where I will admit the wheels briefly came off.
I had nine kids needle felting at once, surrounded by others doing math or learning to spin wool. They were poking themselves, breaking needles, and at one point I genuinely warned the class they were about to see the not nice version of Mrs. Bates. Not because anyone was doing it wrong. I was just overwhelmed. It was pure chaos, but it was organized chaos, and I told the custodians not to even go in that room. Somewhere in the middle of all that, we also built a parade float out of cardboard and walked it through town. The kids (and the community) loved that float!
Somebody once asked me what I'd say to a teacher who thought all of this sounded like way too much for third graders. My honest answer is that it's only big and hard if you're not ready to adapt and change it. Take your passions and share them. When you're really passionate about something, that's when you're the strongest teacher you can be.
The thing I keep coming back to is this: if kids don't know where their food comes from, or how to take care of the land under their feet, they're going to end up relearning (the hard way!) the same history we spent the year studying. So we didn't just study it. We released trout back into the stream at the end of the year. One of my students, Charlotte, put it better than I could. She said we need to put more brook trout in streams so the environment gets better and the species doesn't go extinct, and that they need a lot of trees along the river so the fish have somewhere to hide from predators.
That's a third grader, telling you exactly what to do and why. While Charlotte is almost spot on, the more important thing is to take care of our streams and landscape so it can take care of us for years to come. To any teacher considering something like this, I'd say start smaller than you think you need to and let it grow the way ours did, one grandfather's story, one email, one fish at a time.
For more information, contact Tiffany Bates at South Royalton School, or the Equitable Climate Action Project at info@uvtpc.ocm or see bit.ly/hopefulstories.
