Image Credit: Greg Reseck

Cedarbrook Students Expand Their STEM Education

Cedarbrook Adventist Christian School might be a small school, but its 15 students there are doing big things.

This small school on the Olympic Peninsula is associated with other schools through Loma Linda University’s EXSEED program to study local chum salmon.

The EXSEED program focuses on areas of science, technology, engineering and math, which are commonly abbreviated as STEM. Teachers have a summertime opportunity to participate in a weeklong training session in Loma Linda to increase their STEM proficiency.

The Cedarbrook curriculum projects this year included wading in a local creek with spawning salmon. Students helped count fish at a counting station and visited a local fish hatchery. They also set up a classroom fish tank and watched salmon eggs hatch and grow. Catching and holding a 25-pound chum salmon is an experience most students won’t forget for years to come.

Additionally, students are using salmon to make fish prints, making papier-mache salmon and learning to identify bones from a salmon skeleton.

Located in Port Hadlock, the school is less than a mile from the Puget Sound and close to the Olympic Mountains on 7 acres of fields and forests. The small-school setting gives students a varied and unique educational environment to learn and thrive.

Featured in: April 2015

Author

Greg Reseck

Cedarbrook Adventist Christian School principal and teacher