Finding worms

[VacuumOfOoze]

I work in a school and we are building a mini wormery with the children to show them how worms work in the soil etc. Trying to do as much as possible without spending money (budget reasons but also to encourage recycling and reusing what you already have) so I want to bring in some worms from my own garden. I can find them easy enough by digging in the soil but how do I keep them alive? Seems like a basic question but I don't want to eg not provide enough soil and I turn up in the classroom with a box of dead worms... Preferably from the night before- I'd rather not be out hunting worms before 7am. Would a plastic box with a few tiny air holes and some leaves be ok, maybe add a bit of soil?

You will have to have air-holes and some damp soil or they will dry up and die.

Not quite sure what you mean by a wormery - do you mean a container where worms gradually eat kitchen waste and turn it into compost, or some kind of viewing chamber where earthworms can be seen at work? If the former you need the red tiger/brandling worms or some worms from someone else’s wormery - maybe ask on local facebook? For the viewing chamber thing you can collect some in the evening and keep them in damp earth in a box, bearing in mind they live underground, but they need to be cool and damp to stay alive and that’s going to go for when they are at school too.

I'd pass the task back to the children and their parents. You are bound to have at least one family with a compost bin which will have brandling worms.

Great, thanks for answering such a basic question 😁

We'd be making something like this using a plastic tub https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/blog/2020/05/how-to-make-a-wormery/
So to see the worms 'at work'

Air holes in the lid.

They should be fine for a few days. Then give some grass and some lawn weeds to eat. Keep them out of direct sunlight

I found this link, which has similar instructions to yours.

Earthworms from the garden then; overnight in the damp soil you dug them up from. They want to stay nice and damp and in the dark.

To help find them relatively quickly; mark out a square metre on your lawn and give a decent soaking with the hose. Within the hour several worms will probably surface and can be easily picked up (as opposed to digging for them and possibly slicing them with the spade as you go).
A strange experiment my class did, way back in junior school. It worked.