The 2025-26 Trout in the Classroom season kicked off with our first teacher and volunteer training in Duluth and the Twin Cities! This year we’re holding training sessions in two locations to support our growing and dispersed network of classrooms across the state. The location of the trainings also offered opportunities to utilize a few of our habitat projects as outdoor classrooms, bringing the classroom activity “Design a trout habitat” to life through a real-life example. The full-day training covered an overview of a Trout in the Classroom year, the basics of getting your tank ready for raising trout, and a few activities from our resource guide in the morning.
In the afternoon we headed to a stream where we met up with one of the consultants, as well as our Chapter habitat volunteers, that we worked with to do habitat work along Keene Creek in Duluth and Eagle Creek in Savage. Our consultants, with help from Jenny our habitat director, Peder Yurista from Gitche Gumme Chapter and Tony Nelson from TCTU, talked about what goes into planning and implementing a stream project. They highlighted the design process, career opportunities, and pointed out specific examples of features and such as riffles or toewood and why they were important. Teachers ended the day with time to do a Macroinvertebrate investigation of the stream and a discussion of how they planned on implementing Trout in the Classroom and outdoor experiences into their schoolyear.
Many thanks to Raleigh Academy in Duluth and Jeffers Foundation in Savage for hosting the mornings of our training, Keith Anderson from Beaver River Consulting and Dan Mossing from EOR Consulting for joining out afternoon session to discuss stream restoration, and to all the teachers, volunteers, and Chapter members that showed up!