Worm Viewing, Experiments, Etc.

As well as studying all about worms bodies, their life span, their food and predators, and much much more in our worm books, we also wanted to get up close and personal with our subject. So, after finally catching some worms, we decided to take a look at them using our fancy new microscope. I guess technically you're supposed to look at only "cross-sections" of the earthworm with the microscope, but you can guess how well that idea went over with me. Instead, we simply set the worm on the slide, wiggly as it was, and tried to catch a glimpse of the little hairs on its tummy. Then we just held the worm on a damp wash cloth for the rest of our investigation and studied it with our bare eyes.



It was kind of amazing really. For instance, you probably didn't know it, but earthworms actually have five hearts. If you pick up an earthworm, you can tell it's head from it's tail by looking at the proximity of the ring around it's body, and by watching which end of the worm moves first. After locating the head, you can actually see the five hearts through the worms skin, as well as see the blood pumping through the veins and the dirt passing through the intestines. The kids loved this. They also found it very fascinating that the little ring around the worm is actually called the egg case and it slips off of the worm when the egg case is full of little eggs. I think their favorite fact about earthworms was that each worm is actually both a boy and a girl--they may have tried to fool you already by asking you our worm quiz question: What you would name your worm if you caught one? (We pick a silly question from each unit to ask Dad and our friends. That way the kids get a chance to teach someone else what they are learning when they explain the answers.) It was either that fun fact, or the fact that the largest earthworm is the Great African Earthworm measuring in at 22 feet. We measured it out on our garden hose and that is bigger than our whole family laying end to end on the ground!

In addition to looking at our worms in our hands, we also did a few hands-on projects so that we could get a look at our worms in their natural habitat. Project #1 was to construct a small glass chamber called a worm viewer. We bought all the supplies and followed the directions from one of our books step-by-step and pretty soon we had quite the clever little place to watch our worms tunnel about. (see picture below with our earthworm food experiment.)



Project #2 was a fancy little worm hotel we built out of an old two liter pop bottle. We chopped the top off and then layered different types of soil in the container. Then we placed the worms inside and wrapped construction paper around the bottle to make it pitch black. This encouraged the worms to tunnel near the edges of the bottle so we could observe the way they moved through and mixed up the different layers soil the soil.

Both of these projects proved to be pretty cool, but our earthworm unit couldn't stop there. We had to take advantage of our worms for a little longer and use them in a series of three experiments to gain even further insight into the wonderful world of worms. (We made sure to treat all of our worm subjects with love and respect by the way, and not one of our worm participants was injured or died.) After doing a little bit of research, and getting some ideas from our books, I devised three very simply earthworm experiments. I made up a work sheet that looked like this:

Worm Experiments

#1. Worm Charming

Legend has it that you can charm a worm out of the ground. Most worm charming methods involve vibrating the soil, which encourages the worms to the surface. The worms surface because the vibrations are similar to those produced by digging moles, which prey on earthworms.^[

Date:_________________________________

Tools used for worm charming:______________________________________________

Number of worms collected:_______________

#2. Worm diet

Date:____________________________

Types of food presented:_______________________________________________________

Predictions: _________________________________________________________________

Our Worms Favorite food: __________________________________

#3. Earth Worms as Gardeners

Earthworm castings are said to enrich the soil and cause plants to grow more quickly and more abundantly.

Date: __________________________________

Hypothesis:________________________________________________________

Plant grown:_____________________________

Pot #1--No earthworms Pot #2--earthworms

Results:___________________________________________________________

And we used it to learn all about scientific observation, prediction, and hypothesis testing. Here are the kids with the latter two experiments.

And just for your information, we did actually charm one worm and two slugs out of the ground, our worms preferred parsley, just as Spencer predicted, and our corn with the worms in it's pot did grow better. (just barely--phew!)