{into nature} building a worm home

{into nature} is a weekly Monday post inspiring the exploration of nature. It is a grassroots effort to combat the nature deficiency syndrome in our current generations. Please join this movement back into nature by sharing your own nature inspiration, whether shared through photographs, words, poetry…. leave a link here in the comments for all to enjoy.

“For children, nature comes in many forms. A newborn calf; a pet that lives and dies; a worn path through the woods; a fort nested in stinging nettles; a damp, mysterious edge of a vacant lot- whatever shape nature takes, it offers each child an older, larger world… nature does not steal time; it amplifies it.” -Richard Louv

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last week tanner was helping papa with some yard work when he found two worms.  he toted those worms around with him for the rest of the afternoon, refusing our gentle suggestions to let them go so then don't die.  evening came and he was still with worms, and so came the over tired breakdown when we told him he had to put them down.  he was extremely distraught at the thought of his worms crawling away if he put them down.  after many tears i managed to convince him to put them into one of my unused container beds this way he could find them the next morning.  and as a little extra motivation i threw out the idea that in the morning we would build them a worm home.  morning came and the first thing out of my boy's mouth was "mama can we build the worm home?".  and so to the internet i went in search of building worm homes.  i came up with this great project for building worm homes for preschoolers, just what i was looking for!  (unfortunately i cannot seem to find the original page that i found this idea on- and it was a good one, full of all kinds of earthworm activities for preschoolers, *sigh*)

what you will need:
empty and clean 2 liter plastic bottle (soda bottle)
disposable plastic water bottle (full of room temp water and the lid on)
scissors or knife
dirt
sand
worms
leaf mulch (optional)
rice cereal, bread crumbs, or veggie scraps (optional)

to build our worm home we cut the top portion off of an empty and clean two liter plastic bottle (like the kind soda comes in) and inserted a small plastic bottle (like a disposable drinking water bottle) full of air temperature water with the cap on.  the small bottle is used to keep the worms on the outside of the soda bottle so you can see them better, as well as to help regulate the temperature in the worm home.  next we alternated filling the bottle with dirt and sand.  we planned on keeping our worms for at least a few days so we added some bread crumbs into the layers as recommended by the original instructions (i also just read you can do rice cereal or veggie scraps).

then tanner dug up his beloved worm friends from the day before and put them onto the surface of the filled bottle.


then we went over the papa's leaf compost pile and dug up a little bit of leaf mulch and added it to the top of our bottle.  while we were there we found a few more guests for our worm home.


once our bottle was filled and all our guest had snuggled in, we slipped some black construction paper over the bottle- worms like it dark!  just make sure you put the paper on loose so you can slip it on and off any time you little one wants to check on the worms.

and as tanner and noah would say, TA DA!  our worms have made themselves quite at home.  the boys enjoy checking on them a few times a day and observing all their worm caves.  i find that the vibration of handling the bottle for a few minutes will even bring some of our worms back up to the surface so you can say hi! 

the boys had a lot of fun with this project.  we'll be releasing our worms back into the garden shortly but i'm sure this will be a project we will be repeating!