Making Compost Stew

In April, my class learns about the environment and we spend a week talking about each of the three Rs, reducing our use, reusing what we've used in new ways, and recycling everything we can.  Today, it seemed fitting to make a special Earth day snack for us, and for our class pets. 

For snack, my kids made chocolate pudding "MUD!", complete with worms. They ate them out of planters I found at the dollar store.  My kids loved pretending that it was real mud!

For snack for our worms,  the kids cut up banana peels, apple and pear cores, and grape fruit and orange rinds. We added water and pulsed them into tiny pieces in the Magic Bullet.

Layer by layer, we added dried leaves and newspaper, dirt, and our food waste to an old hermit crab container to make our Compost Stew. We put our worms in the container, made sure it was a little damp, and set the container outside for the sun to do its magic.  We plan on watching our compost over the next month or so to see what changes take place inside our compost bin.

We also played a fun composting game with the pretend food from our kitchen.  We went through the bin placing items that can be composted in one pile and items that should not be included in another. It was good practice for starting our compost bin and super fun to say that meat would make it STINKY!

The book that inspired this lesson? Compost Stew: An A to Z Recipe for the Earth by Mark McKenna Siddal and Ashley Wolf.   We repeated the sing-song rhyme from this book as mixed our stew: "Put in all in a pot... and let it rot... into COMPOST STEW!"

Happy Earth Day!