Worm Charming 101

So, with our animal classification system in place, it was now time to get to the real, hands-on science classes. While there were several things I had in mind to study in this class, after much begging and pleading, I agreed to let the kids pick our first course of study. They picked.....drumroll please......Earthworms. Yep, Earthworms. We found a million of them while planting our garden, and the kids wanted to catch them and study them. So, that's exactly what we did. But not without a good trip to the library first though. For our first class period we sorted through almost a hundred earthworm books at the library and ended up bringing around twenty home with us. After the kids went to bed that night, I looked through all the books and divided them into categories: fictional stories about worms, worm information books (body parts, predators, etc.), and worm experiment books. Then I made a schedule for the week. The first order of business on our schedule: well catching some worms of course. But we couldn't simply go out and dig them up again as we had when we planted our garden. Oh, no. That would be too simple (and sane). Instead we decided to try out some good old worm folklore. In one of the earthworm books, it talked about how to charm worms. Apparently you're supposed to be able to go outside, under just the right circumstances, (moist soil, not too much light, etc.) and using a pitch fork and a wooden stake, simply charm the worms right out of the ground. The idea is to plant the pitch fork points deep in the soil, and then stroke it with a ridged wooden stake. This is supposed to send vibrations into the ground and simulate the feeling of a mole tunneling near the earthworm. Since moles and earthworms are arch enemies, supposedly this causes the worms to scurry to the surface. Over in Scotland and Wales, they actually have worm charming competitions were the individuals charm hundreds of worms out of the ground in only minutes. Unfortunately for us; however, the worms in our area seem to be friendly with the moles. Either that, or too clever for our stunt. We did give it a valiant effort though. And we did even better than a ridged wooden stake. After several trial runs, we felt like the best combination for our worm charming expedition was a rake stroked with an old snow mobile belt.



The vibrations were fabulous, but only fabulous enough to charm out the neighbors on either side of us. Then we just had to explain what we were up too--and you can guess how well that went over. Oh well. Back to the shoveling!