Field Trips
- Grade Level:
- High School: Ninth Grade through Twelfth Grade
- Subject:
- Science
After completing three in-class, pre-visit activites, students will visit Rock Creek Park for a field study. In the pre-visit activites they will learn about fish species and fish ladders and students will compare fish ladders they design to the one at Peirce Mill dam and analyze why their design will/won’t work. Students will create a foldable that includes the life cycle stages of the river herring in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Students then will draw and name common fish found in Rock Creek using basic fish anatomy characteristics.
Once in the park they will collect authentic data about habitat assessment and water quality and conduct a fish census at two sites. There they will learn about how national parks include lands that have been important to humans for generations because of the abundance of natural resources, how national parks preserve natural and cultural resources, and how when people change natural areas to suit their needs, their changes may interfere with survival of some organisms.
After the visit, students will analyze their data and will determine the environmental impacts that affect the survival rate of anadromous fish.
This field trip is part of the Bridging the Watershed (BTW) curriculum program. BTW is an outreach program of the Alice Ferguson Foundation, in partnership with the National Park Service (NPS) and area schools, designed to promote student academic achievement, personal connections with the natural world, lifelong civic engagement, and environmental stewardship through hands-on curriculum-based outdoor studies in national parks and public lands.
For more information on participating in this field study, contact the BTW program.
Last updated: February 11, 2019