Students in Year 4, 5 and 7 and 8 have been enjoying learning about how worms can compost our waste food at school as part of this term's ECA in soil and compost. The aim of the ECA is to learn about the vital role healthy soil plays in supporting our food production, and also to learn how to use a lot of the waste we produce as a school to create healthy soil.
Students collected the waste vegetables and fruit that is discarded during lunch preparations which included Morning Glory stems and Guava Peels. Then they prepared worm gardens using plastic bottles that would otherwise have been recycled or thrown away. They put waste coconut dust (the waste from making a coconut product called coir) and cow dung into their bottles to make the worms some bedding and give them a sustained food source. Then they placed a layer of waste vegetables on the top of the habitat , watered it, and finally, covered it with damp newspaper.
When you lift the newspaper, you can often see the worms wiggle back down under the light from the top of the habitat where they were feeding on their bottles.
What is particularly impressive is how some students, who are a bit nervous about the worms and their wiggly sliminess, have really challenged themselves to hold worms (small ones at first) and get used to them. The other really impressive thing is that they all are very caring about the worms and want to learn how they feed and reproduce, how long they live, and what their cocoons look like. We could spend the whole term just learning about worms, but coming next, we will learn to build a compost pile using the waste grass clippings from our playing fields.