Earthworm Exploration for Kids

Looking for worms in the dirt. The grass growth was accidental–we accidentally spilled some seed into the worms’ container! It didn’t seem to bother them though.

Spring is my favorite time of the year because of all of the opportunities we have to engage with nature. This activity was a perfect compliment to the garden we had started! First, we read the book Garden Wigglers: Earthworms in Your Backyard by Nancy Loewen. It would be at the perfect level for Pre-K 4/Kindergarten, but I ended up paraphrasing some of the wordier pages for my Pre-K 3 class. I love this book despite its wordiness because of its great vocabulary. We learned about worm castings, the anatomy of a worm, and it even suggested that we pick worms up from the sidewalk and return them to the grass after it rains. It was the perfect introduction for us to get our class worms!

I ordered these worms from Amazon. They came in a pack of 500, which I shared with the other Pre-K classes at our school. We turned the worms into one of our centers activities.

“It feels soft! And it tickles!”

I learned that it won’t hurt the worms to touch or play with them as long as we keep the table and our hands damp. I was so pleasantly surprised at how gentle our girls were with the worms! Even the ones who didn’t enjoy the sensation of the worms on the hands were able to return them to the soil gently. 

“Its crawling so fast!”

In the coming weeks we will begin to start talking about what worms eat, how their castings can be beneficial to our garden, and start our own classroom compost bin! Stay posted for updates!