Monday 31 March 2014

Worms and Beans!

Our two missions for the day; set up a Wormery and plant some beans in jars!
I've also had a new starter recently so this is introducing 'Little E' to my setting!

We started off with a story all about worms. We learnt they have head and tails ends, and we also learnt, contrary to popular belief, that if you chop a worm in half it dies.
'Little E' was taking some time to make friends with Kane!!

Pip dug up some mud from the garden and then the children all took turns scooping in a layer of mud, then some coloured sand, them more mud, a layer of sand etc until it was filled almost to the top!
'Little E' getting into the mud too!!!
 The sand we think is so it will fall into the worm holes and we can see clearly where they have been! The first level didn't work so well, we worked out maybe we needed to break up the clumps of mud a bit more!
The red level looks much better!

Next we need some food for our worms! We checked back in the story what worms like to eat. Then went off on a hunt for old leaves and bits that thought they would like!
 Crunch it up a a bit and lay the food out on top!
Just one thing missing now; The Worms!!
Back into the flower bed, Pip did some more digging, we discovered the deeper down we dig, the bigger worms we find!
We had some practice at using magnifying glasses too. The children automatically put the glass to their face so we showed them if they keep their faces back but move the magnifying glass closer to the object...
It works much better!!

 In they went and the wormery was put on a window ledge, with a sleeve to keep it warm but dark and the worms will be happy! We will check back in on them occasionally to see the tunnels they have left behind!

The second story of the day was Jasper's Beanstalk! I took over to read this one. We read the story and then spoke about what we had learnt, the children used some knowledge they already had to tell us what was good for plants and what was bad for plants!
Because we want to see the roots and shoots of the bean when they begin to grow we are doing the good old growing beans in a jar!! We got some kitchen roll, round the inside of the jar, and then placed the bean between the paper and the side of the jar
 Then put some water in for the kitchen paper to soak up!
 We then got a clipboard and a sticky label to mark our own jars so we knew which was which!

 Then just like in the story the girls knew we had to be patient for our beans to grow so they decided to lay down and watch them for a while!
These jars will be placed in window somewhere (we are running out of window ledge space with all this planting!!) and wait to see what happens!

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