We were on vacation camping last week and I had all of these fun projects planned to blog about but didn’t get to any of them!! It’s a good thing we had our indoor camping week before we left 🙂 I guess camping in and of itself was enough ‘education’…at least the type I believe in!
We are looking at bugs this week! So fittingly I started off our week with a dirt based project…after all that is how the kids spent most of their time last week!
Anyway, back to our worm farm inspired by A Bird and a Bean (I know technically a worm isn’t a bug but close enough). We started by gathering our farm materials.
You will need:
– a large and small water bottle
– plastic wrap
– dirt
– sand
– Cheerios
Hard to tell in this picture, but first we cut the tops of the bottles off and placed the small one inside the large bottle upside down. You don’t have to do this but it will help make the worm tunnels more visible as they can’t go in the inner core of the bottle.
Next, layer dirt, sand and crushed up Cheerios and leaves in the bottle until full.
We added some compost materials such as strawberry greens and banana peels to the top as well for more worm food.
Now dig for some worms! Always a favorite in our family…Mack named his worms Ghoso, Ghostbuster, Slimer and Zuel. Once your worms are in, you will want to cover the top. For now we are using plastic wrap with holes poked in the top but we will probably switch to some screen or burlap so that we can feed them easier.
We can’t wait to watch these guys dig their tunnels!
They like a moist, dark and cool environment so we will give the dirt a few sprays of water a day and keep some black construction paper wrapped around our farm when we aren’t viewing them. And after we have seem the little worms at work for a few days we will return them to our garden. After all part of the education is the importance of worms for our plants!
Hi, This is Aurea Rivera
I teach a class of three year olds and would like to create a worm tower kind of terrarium concept. Your worm farm seems to be the best I have come across, thank you. I have two questions, would mealey worms work the same as earth worms? Second question, I wanted to plant small plants into my bigger container to dress it up a bit. would this work?
Thank you, Aurea aureariv474@yahoo.com
I believe they would work you would just need to double check to see what they eat. And planting something is a great idea! You could fill the inside with potting soil and plant something at the top there! We are making a new one this spring, I’m going to try that!