Wiggly Worms

I am not a fan of bugs. Or really crawly things of any kind. But I cannot keep a class plant alive for anything and am pretty sure that fish or hamsters would suffer the same fate at my hands.
I got the idea to do a worm farm from Z-man. He loves looking for worms in our front yard. We flip over the bricks around our dogwood tree and hope to see something wiggling down a whole. I put on my big girl britches and try to grab them and hold them so he can see them squirming around. We talk about how we have to be gentle with worms and all God's creatures. I love the experience, even though I hate the buggers.
But worms seem relatively fool proof and I was pretty sure I couldn't mess them up, so I ordered this worm farm off of Amazon. The kids in my class read the booklet that came with the farm and we started bringing shovels and buckets to the playground to dig for worms as the season changed from winter to spring.

The conversations about hibernation, temperatures, burrowing, taking care of nature, composting...cool stuff. Eventually as the weather warmed up, we found a handful of worms and were able to start our worm farm.

Now, about every two weeks, we dump the worm farm out (gently). We collect new dirt from the playground and put the old dirt in the garden outside the school. We talk about how the worms break down the soil and poop fertilizer (cue the four year-old giggles) which is so good for plants. The kids love sifting the dirt to find the worms.  The last time we did this, we found worm eggs! We had read about the life cycle of worms in Wiggling Worms at Work and so the kids immediately recognized that the small, hard yellowish balls were worm eggs. I'm super excited to see if there are less eggs and more worms the next time we dump it. And you know what? The little buggers are growing on me.