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Art takes spawning lesson to new level

BY VENICE BUHAIN

THE OLYMPIAN

LACEY — Shannon Andino and Brandon Meyer's descriptions of Kennedy Creek during salmon spawning season are deceptively simple.

 “Dead salmon,” Brandon said.

“The water was milky,” Shannon said of the fertilization process. “I know that sounds kind of weird.”

But last month's field trip won't be a fleeting memory for the eighth-graders and their classmates in the mixed classes of teachers An-nette Wells, language arts, and Jenna Glock, science.

The seventh- and eighth-graders have captured the science lessons of that trip in art and poetry that will be on display Thursday at Komachin Middle School. It is an example of Komachin's emphasis on combining different school subjects to tie classroom lessons to real life.

One of Shannon's poems, “The Flow,” describes her impression: “Love hides in the eggs that are produced by a female salmon.”

Her illustration shows a pink salmon wrapping itself around a cluster of eggs.

Brandon drew pictures of salmon under tall trees. He wrote: “This is why the salmon come back, They come back to die in a beauti-ful graveyard, They die in peace, They're not afraid of what's yet to come.”

Everyone at the school, which combines the seventh- and eighth-grade classes, took part in the assignment. The science and lan-guage arts teachers, who work in teams that also include social studies and math teachers, accompanied their classes to Kennedy Creek to watch the process of salmon reaching their spawning ground, where they die shortly after breeding.

“Each student got to see salmon spawning, and they looked at the scientific part of it,” language arts teacher Wells said.

Students saw aggressive male salmon throwing their bodies over others. They saw carcasses of salmon, which die after laying eggs or fertlizing them, lining the creek bed.

Students were impressed by what they saw, and they took notes in their journals, Wells said. Then, they transformed what they saw, smelled and heard into powerful, single-sentence descriptions.

Wells invited artist Susan Burnham to teach her students how to incorporate those images into artwork. The descriptions were transformed into poetry.

Komachin encourages “cross-curricular” learning, or lessons that span different subject areas, principal Troy Oliver said.

“They're learning, studying ecosystems; they study the salmon,” Oliver said.

“So instead of writing a poem about a random thing, let's tie it in with what we're doing with science,” he said.

Eighth-grader Shelby Collins, 14, said crossing the subjects allows students to be creative.

“I like the incorporation between science and language arts,” she said.

Reach Venice Buhain at 360-754-5445 or vbuhain@theolympian.com.

To view some of the artwork:

KC Visual Poems