This is a nice easy one that’s lots of fun and not messy! If you’re studying mini beasts or autumn this one is good fun as you can go on a ‘worm hunt’ from the comfort of your own home, great for rainy autumn days.
You will need:
Water Beads – these are tiny balls you can buy cheaply off
ebay or similar. They’re none toxic but I would advise serious supervision as
they are a potential choking hazard. We bought black as a good representation
of ‘soil’
Spaghetti – these are your ‘worms’
About 24 hours before you want to play you need to soak your
water beads, this makes them beef up to full size, make sure you put them in a
bowl plenty large enough for them to grow to full size.
Cook your spaghetti as you would normally. Al dente is best
so little fingers can grab the worms without splitting them in half.
Drain off excess water from the spaghetti and the water
beads and mix the two together.
At this point you can set a few ideas going or do what I did and just let the kids loose. The boys had plenty fun rescuing the ‘worms’ and seeing who could get the most into their bowls. We tried to use tools to get out the worms, forks and chopsticks – it was hard! Sometimes the worms got split into more, smaller worms, and we counted how many more we got each time one split.
We talked about how worms travel up and down through the
soil, and how they can breathe using the gaps between the soil (these are extra
obvious using the balls). We tried to think if our worms had a ‘head’ end and a
‘tail’ end.
We then played with the balls, running our hands through
them and feeling them. We scooped them up and filled up glasses with them,
pouring them back and forth. We’ve played with these balls before but they are
always good fun.
All in all we had a long very engaged play with a theme that
tied in with the ‘minibeasts’ project that was being studied at Playgroup that
term.
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