Keelin Cox works on a fly-fishing lure during a recent after-school fly-tying program at Chariho Middle School.

The Providence Journal / Kathy Borchers

RICHMOND — A new program is teaching Chariho Middle School students about entomology and ecology while they develop fine motor skills and a sense of rhythm.

It’s all about fly fishing.

The program has attracted 13 seventh-graders who take classes in fly fishing and six students who have been learning to tie flies in an after-school program with John O’Meara and Bill Arzamarski, from United Fly Tyers of Rhode Island. Several members of the school staff have also said they would like to learn about the sport and the art and science that swirl through it.

“The best part will be catching a fish with a fly I made by myself,” said Zach Robinson, a seventh-grader from Richmond who participates in the after-school program. He will have a chance to catch fish on his flies April 5. A week before Opening Day of trout season, the state’s aquatic education program will open one of its trout-hatchery ponds to the Chariho program. Zach has a mean-looking Woolly Bugger that should devastate trout, bass, and any other fish on the prowl for prey.

This week, he and Keelan Cox, a sixth-grade student from Hope Valley, were both working on saltwater streamers, flies that simulate baitfish.

Guidance counselor Alex McLeod helped Arzamarski supervise the students.

McLeod knows the feeling of catching his first fish on a fly. In 1994, he was counseling kids in a school on Martha’s Vineyard during the day, and fishing at night. One night, he could not catch a fish on conventional gear as the fishermen around him took one bass after another on fly tackle.

McLeod marched off to Coop’s Bait and Tackle Shop, an Orvis store in Edgartown, and got the necessary gear and training. He remembered, “My first night with a fly rod, on East Beach [on Chappaquiddick], I caught three bluefish and a 38-inch striper.”

When McLeod moved to Rhode Island, he established a fly-fishing program at the Met Center in Providence. He still maintains contact with his former students, now adults who fly fish.

Last school year, he and Dan Potts, a science teacher and fellow angler, established the fly fishing program at Chariho. In 2007, Potts received a $1,000 Chariho Community Education Projects Grant. This year, the school’s Parent Teacher Organization provided money for the after-school program. Two Hope Valley business owners, Billy Hopkins of Hope Valley Bait & Tackle and John Ure of URE Outfitters, helped the school buy rods, reels and fly-tying kits at wholesale prices.

Until now, the students have been learning about aquatic insects and their environment as they tie flies that simulate real bugs. Many of their artificial flies are tiny and require fine motor skills. As spring approaches, the students will learn to cast the nearly weightless flies, a skill that requires rhythm.

Keelan Cox fishes with his father, Greg Zenion, the middle school’s acting principal. “We have a place we call ‘the secret spot,’ ” Keelan said, “and we fish for trout — rainbows, if you want to get particular.”

Zenion recently bought a fly rod. He is one of several staff members who are about to join students learning about fly fishing and all that runs through it.

“Textbooks can be a wonderful resource for learning about the world around us,” McLeod said, “but one needs to get out into the world to make true sense of it. For example, it’s one thing for a student to read about a stonefly. It’s an entirely different educational experience when a student can recreate a stonefly by tying a stonefly pattern — and furthermore, to take samples of bugs on a particular stretch of stream and identify the bugs.”

McLeod and Potts are planning to have older students become fly-fishing mentors to younger kids — an idea Potts already uses in a vegetable-gardening program.

“These students are our future leaders, legislators, teachers, scientists, consumers, land-owners, and anglers,” McLeod said. “If we want to preserve and improve our natural resources and opportunities to fish, then we need to show and teach them how special these activities are.

“Some of these students may only enjoy the artistic outlet of tying flies, while others will tie flies for the practical purpose of using them for fishing. But in the end, a seed will hopefully be planted that will motivate them to work toward preserving this very fragile and satisfying recreational activity.”

tmeade@projo.com