Worms!
One particularly wet morning just before winter break, we stumbled upon a peculiar creature wiggling across the front yard grass. What was it doing here? We moved in to take a closer look.
A worm! It seemed friendly. Should we touch it? Maybe not. Surprisingly, the children were quite apprehensive to find out what the wiggly little creature felt like. They would harness their bravery, reach toward the worm, and quickly change their minds. They did, however, seem to be very curious about it. We immediately went on a hunt for more. We scoured the yard for quite a while, but couldn’t find much. We ultimately decided to head into the classroom to assemble some worm-catching kits. Each child got a bag and filled it with supplies including gloves, a magnifying glass, and a jar of soil (our group is pretty sure worms like dirt). When we were finished, we headed back out to the front. The magnifying glasses seemed to do the trick: we found worms everywhere! It looked like they were all digging deep down below the grass (and moving quite quickly), so we knew we had to move fast! The children all carried their worm-catching kits carefully by their sides as we tiptoed around the yard, taking care not to step on any of our worm friends. Lots of spontaneous conversation arose, mostly about what to do each time we found one and whether or not we should touch them. Again, the children surprised us with their apprehension around touching the worms. Ultimately, many of the children gathered their courage and ended up picking up the worms with gloved hands only to get them into their jars, and as we became more comfortable on our worm hunt, a few of the children felt brave enough to give some of the worms a quick, one-fingered pet.
After we finished our search, we had jars full of worms! We kept them in the classroom for observation, added some food scraps to our jars, and had a few discussions together about them.
Some highlights of what we know about worms include:
“Worms like strawberries and tomatoes.” - Miah
“Worms like wet rain. They like compost.” - Berkeley
“Gloves” - Dominic
“They like to be in the dirt for a long time, like a million minutes.” - Berkeley
“Worms they catch fishies.” - Miah
“I know that they grow.” - Lukas
“Worms they look like snake.” - Miah
“I noticed that worms eat tomatoes.” - Lukas
Some highlights of what we wonder about worms include:
“What are the sizes of worms?” - Berkeley
“My question is when they go up, they can fall.” - Lukas
“I want to know about worms where they go.” - Berkeley
In the few days following our big worm excursion, worms have popped up in other areas of our play, including some rubber worms in our sensory bin, an invitation to draw worms, and many more worms arriving in our Dig Pit! (We’ve captured a few and observed a few.) Miah has been leading the charge of naming the worms we find, and has named our four Dig Pit worms Miah, Turtle, Mommy, and Daddy.
We look forward to seeing if the collective interest in worms has survived our winter break!