One night this summer I was on Pinterest (of course) and I came across a pin about
vermicomposting (worm composting). I had heard of
vermicomposting before, but hadn't really read up on it much so I started doing a little research. There's a lot of information out there! Last year our school had a fresh fruits and
vegetable program. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays the kids were given either a fresh fruit or vegetable for their snack. My mind immediately went to using the waste leftover from this program and the waste from lunch and turning it into compost rather than simply throwing it away.
Alli and I discussed it and, despite the initial disgust with thinking about having worms in our room, we decided to go for it! An added bonus? Learning about decomposers is part of our 4th grade science curriculum! Our first step was to find out how to even get the worms. For composting, you can't simply go outside and dig up some earthworms. The worms need to be
redworms. We found some on
Amazon for a decent price that came with quite a few worms. I just happened to be talking to my mom about our idea and she mentioned that a family friend was actually vermicomposting and we could potentially get worms from her! We called her up, and she was more than willing to donate worms to our classroom.
Woohoo! When we went to visit our family friend, we were fortunate enough to have her give us a mini lesson on running a vermicomposting system. She walked us through setting up our first bin and talked to us about maintaining the bins and potential problems that could arise.
It is very important to have a balance of "brown and green" materials in your bin. The majority of your bin should be brown materials when you begin, but the worms need "green" materials as well to survive. Brown materials= high carbon and Green materials=high nitrogen. "Brown" materials consist of items like cardboard, newspaper, sawdust, and envelopes. Coffee grounds, tea bags, eggshells, and food scraps are all "Green" materials. It is also important to keep the worm bin moist but not wet.
For our rollout of the worm bins in class we split the kids into 5 groups. We gave them resources to use to research how to make the worm beds. However, that was all the guidance we gave them. We really wanted the first round to be experimental and to have it be totally their creation. Well, needless to say, we have had some worm casualties! These casualties have sparked some great problem solving conversations and an understanding for the importance of research. We check our worm bins and record observations every Friday.
We will be starting our more structured rounds of vermicomposting soon. We will post more findings as we dig deeper into our worm bins!
