Thursday, April 11, 2013

Building a Worm Hotel

     april 11 081
 Today we went on a worm walk.
april 11 007  april 11 070
It was dry out today and we really had to search to find live worms. 
One child told us that worms don’t like the sun so we found a shady
spot and started to search.  We dug and dug under the old leaves.
      april 11 054
We finally found some, shared them, then pulled out our Nature Bags.
    april 10 033
Our nature bags was full of the things we needed for measuring worms.
      april 11 016
 april 11 062 april 11 063
The children used the cubes to measure how long their worm was. 
They counted each cube till they had the length of their worm.
    april 11 013
They added marks on their paper to match the blocks.

    april 11 019
Once everyone had a worm we headed to the garden to build
our worm hotel.  We started by scooping soil into a big jar. 
     april 11 077
A smaller bottle was centered in the big jar to make the space
narrower so we can see the worms tunneling once they move in. 
We also added layers of dead leaves and sand.
april 11 078  april 11 080
We moved the worms into their new home.
        april 11 028
I explained the reason we added a layer of sand was so we
would be able to see where the worms move around their
hotel.  They’ll move the sand and soil as they tunnel.
   april 11 082

And as the child said earlier, “worms don’t like the sun”,
we’ll keep them covered when we’re not watching.