On a very rainy Friday, Issaquah Creek looked more like a river.

“They should make it to Lake Sammamish pretty quickly,” Issaquah Mayor Ava Frisinger told third-graders from Issaquah Valley Elementary School. The students, from Leona Keltner’s class, were there to release Kokanee fry into the creek to begin their life journey.

Three docents split the class up as the kids went to four different learning stations. At the creek’s edge, King County ecologist Hans Berge, whose daughter is in Keltner’s class, helped each child individually release their fry. Scooping some out of a large bucket into a cup, the kids sent the little creatures on their way one-by-one. He explained that they will stay in Lake Sammamish three to four years, before returning to the hatchery.

Kokanee are the land-locked form of sockeye salmon. Because they never migrate out to the ocean to feed, kokanee are often much smaller than sockeye.

“It’s going to be really hard for them to come upstream,” said student Zarrina Nurullina when docent Grace Reamer asked the students about the raging state of the creek that day.

Two stations taught the kids about what happens to the watershed as a result of development. A model of a community with a creek running through it, was used to communicate how pollutants can make their way to Lake Sammamish.

Kids took turns dumping dirt, oil, trash and fertilizer onto the little town. There was even a little farm in the area.

“Is that supposed to be the poop?” asked Markus Santos, as the docent dropped brown matter onto the cow field.

Then, using eye-droppers they created rain. Almost instantly the various matter made it into the storm water system, and into the “lake.”

The kids learned how important it is to have trees line creeks that are salmon habitat, to prevent erosion.

The final station was designed to better understand how the fish come home to where they started. Each child was blindfolded and asked to smell something in a container. Then, with lines set up to represent a creek system, parent volunteers had them smell containers they were holding. If the smell matched, they went in the direction of that smell.

There was some confusion, but as the docent said, sometimes even the fish get confused, forcing them to turn around and go back until they find their way home.

Docent Grace Reamer shows third-graders from Issaquah Valley Elementary School the early life cycle of Kokanee fry.

William Pearson and Nancy Diaz, both third-grade students from Issaquah Valley Elementary School, drop oil onto a model of a community with a creek running through it, in a demonstration showing how pollutants make it all the way to Lake Sammamish.

Third-grader Anna Berge begins her “swim” upstream to find her way home, in an exercise where the students had to recognize a smell to find the right stream to go home to, just as salmon do.