This was a fun project the boys and I put together to learn about what living things need and how composting and decomposing work.

We got our worms from a gas station but you can find yours in your backyard, on the sidewalk after a fresh rain, in a bait shop, or another place that sells them for fishing.

Once we got the worms home we kept them in the fridge because worms like cool dark places and we did this project when it was 100°F outside and we don’t currently have AC. (I know! Tell me about it lol)

First I had the boys grab some gravel from our gravel driveway but you can find gravel at a local park, or river’s edge and lined the bottom of the jar to ensure proper drainage.

Then we added a layer of soil. You can get a bag of soil at any hardware or gardening store. We happen to have a hill of topsoil for our pending landscaping and just scooped out of that.

We followed it up with a layer of sand. We had just bought play sand for another experiment and some fun so we grabbed some from there but sand can be found at the beach or on playgrounds.

Click the image above to download your own Worm Farm instructions

Kitchen scraps were the easiest because I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have some wilted veggies in their fridge but if you are awesome at eating all your fruits and veggies just save pepper cores and other scraps for a day or two and add them on top of the sand.

Finally, we added some more topsoil to the top and introduced the worms to their new home. If we had grass seed it would have fun to sprinkle it on top and spray it daily with a water bottle to watch them grow but since we don’t currently have grass seed we just cut crass clippings from the wild grass that grows on our property to provide more food for the little worms.

Since we want our worms to work their way to the edges so we can observe them we also wrapped construction paper around the jar to keep it nice and dark before returning them to the fridge with a lid set on top off set a little to let air in.

It is very important to make sure it is not too hot for the worms!

Every day we will spritz it with water and check on our friends. Writing our observations in our science journal.

This FREE printable is part of the landforms and biomes curriculum available in August 2021.