BREWER – A group of 130 local pupils spent Friday morning making boats out of recycled materials and learning about the Penobscot Nation and salmon habitats. Then they acted like the fish and “smelled” their way around the state’s spawning rivers in an unusual matching game that they loved playing.

Afterward, Gilbert Gonzalez, acting under secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development, announced $7.6 million in river preservation funding during a special event at the Penobscot Conservation Association headquarters on North Main Street.

As the checks, blown up in size to 4 feet by 1.5 feet, were presented, the pupils’ mouths dropped open, they exclaimed “wow” and applauded after hearing the amount that each of four communities would receive. Pupils in the third grade at Eddington Elementary School and Washington Street School in Brewer took part in the educational event.

“I liked the checks and making my boat,” Tyler Brooks, 9, of Washington Street School said after the presentation.

Tyler’s boat was made out of styrofoam wrapped in tinfoil, with Popsicle sticks and toothpicks with corks sticking out the sides. A fuzzy brown pipe cleaner was added as decoration.

The USDA Rural Development agency awarded Brewer $2.4 million, Bucksport $2.99 million, Lincoln Sanitary District $610,000, and Old Town $1.5 million.

Associates from the Maine Discovery Museum in Bangor helped the children, who were split into four smaller groups, with their boats, as other groups learned Penobscot Nation folklore from historian Jim Francis. They also learned how and where salmon live from biologist Richard Dill of the Maine Atlantic Salmon Commission and how salmon return home to spawn from Peter Steenstra, outreach educator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Francis told the “Frog Monster” myth about Klooscap, a Penobscot Indian hero who lives on Mount Katahdin. Klooscap used a giant tree to smash the mountain-sized frog monster, which had swallowed all of the state’s water, into hundreds of smaller pieces that became the waterways, lakes and ponds of Maine. “According to Penobscot legend, that’s how the Penobscot River was created,” he said.

A 3-foot stuffed salmon was used by Steenstra to demonstrate to the pupils how large an average salmon grows. He told the youth that fish remember the smell of the river in which they were born and follow it to find their way home from the ocean when it is time to spawn.

To demonstrate, Steenstra had several chairs set up with glass jars, each containing a different smell such as coffee or peppermint to represent the Maine rivers where salmon spawn. He gave each child a small vile filled with the substances and had them use their noses to match vials to glass jars.

“Mine smells like soap,” one third-grader said while looking for his matching river.

U.S. Rep. Michael Michaud and representatives from the offices of U.S. Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, along with several local and state USDA-Rural Development employees, were in attendance.

Mike Grondin, Maine’s program director for business and Rural Development, demonstrating how state and federal laws have cleaned up Maine rivers in recent decades, showed a piece of fishing line he used as a youth to fish in the Kennebec River.

“My fishing line got coated with a black tarry substance,” he said. “I sent a piece of my dirty fishing line to the governor [John Reed] and asked him: ‘Why can’t we have laws that protect the river?'”

Grondin told the group of 8- to 10-year-olds that it doesn’t matter how old they are, they can make a difference in protecting the state’s rivers. Gonzalez reiterated the statement by adding that it is important to learn as much as possible.

“It’s our responsibility to be environmental stewards,” he said. “Earth Day was last Friday, but what you need to know is every day is Earth Day. It’s not just once a year.”