KAITIAKI OF THE ENVIRONMENT

At the beginning of term 3 as a class we went for a walk around our school to have a look at things we thought could be improved.

We talked about all of the things we found and thought about which one we could try and take leadership of, which would help to make our school environment better.

We decided on looking after the worm farm, we thought this would help Josh as he already has lots of jobs!

It would also obviously help the worms and our school environment as we could use the worm wee and casting to make fertilizer to help make the other plants around our school grow better.

During our learning we found out some interesting facts about worms

Did you know…….

Earthworms live in the garden. They will not survive in a worm farm so you can’t collect worms from the garden to make a worm farm with.

Tiger worms live in worm farms. They have stripes on their bodies like tigers!

Tiger worms eat their own body weight of food every day.

Worms have 5 hearts!

Worms breathe through their skin so they don’t like to be too wet or dry.

Tiger worms can lay over 1500 eggs every year and there can be 3 to 4 worms inside each egg!

If you touch a worm with your hands it burns their skin which is why they wiggle and squirm!

We took samples from the worm farm and had a look at hoe many worms were in each sample and what food we could identify that we thought they were eating and what other creatures were living with them.

We found out that our worms were not very happy and they needed more good food FAST!

We planned out what we would need to look after the worm farm. We wrote letters to ask for money to buy these things.

We created posters about what worms do like and do not like to eat.

We then bought buckets with lids and put these posters onto the buckets and gave one to each classroom. We went and talked to each classroom about what should and should not go into the buckets for the worms.

At the beginning of Term 4 we had noticed that the lid of the worm farm was bending upwards on each end and letting in far too much water for the worms liking.

We needed to modify the lid so that it stopped most of the rain from getting in. With some help from Jo and a little bit of kiwi ingenuity we fixed up our old lid with some other recycled building products.

We took another sample of worms and we now have LOTS of happy, healthy worms and babies galore!

We hope to get some worm wee to use on our school fruit trees soon!