Last week I used this great idea from my friends Steve and Amy Smith (Thanks guys!!).  My kids decided to call it the Great Worm Experiment of ‘010.  They all call 2010 ‘010 because all the years before them were called something with an ‘0! 😉

We began by discussing, no wait, they began discussing worms when they came in from recess last Monday.  They wanted to know why after it rains there are so many worms on the sidewalks.  So we did a test to see if we could find out.  We took some of the worms out of our compost bin and used them as guinea pig worms.  We covered half of a cookie sheet with a wet paper towel and half with a dry paper towel and did several trials to determine what the worms liked best.

The worms seemed to be undecided, half were inclined to go to the wet side and half on the dry side.  We decided to make it more like a rainy day, soaking the paper towels with a watering can.

More of the worms headed for drier ground this time.  We then talked about why the worms might like it a little drier, but not completely dry.  Some of the kids said we should think about where they live, in the soil where it’s kind of moist all the time, and that led to determining if they liked dark or light better.  We again checked our compost bin and did not see any worms crawling around on the surface and when we mixed the soil we saw the worms dive for the darkness.  Just for the fun of it, we tried it with our worms we had out of the bin.

Most of the worms went under the paper or under a paper towel.  Then we wrote about it:

Kristen 🙂