"One last thing is for the student to know why their experiment is important in the real world." One of my problems with the original hypothesis of which kitchen scraps would a worm prefer is how that makes a difference. It's not practical to separate food scraps into separate components. You might show that worms prefer watermelon rinds to beans but have you ever heard anyone complain about the amount of watermelon rinds causing problems at the landfill even after the 4th of July picnic? In this world of 'going green', I think I'd look at items that do present problems at the landfill but should not. A recycling company wants the easy to recycle stuff like newspaper, magazines, junkmail and old telephone books. Even in our city where we now have an active recycling initiative for paper and plastic we have things that are routinely sent to the landfill. A couple things come to mind. One is the papertowels from a restaurant or airport restroom. You could probably even get the information from the airport to compute the tonnage of waste paper they deal with. Another is disposable diapers -even though human waste is probably not something I would think a young child should be exposed to. And I'm not sure how well the worms can handle decomposing diapers anyway. A better choice would be lawn scraps. Particularly now that this is the time of year people will sending tons to the landfill instead of composting it themselves. You could even separate the lawn refuse into pure grass clippings vs chipped shrubbery scraps. I am aware that these will heat up and all that but you can do a week of precomposting them all after innoculating them with a measured amount of casting tea before adding the worms. The experiment would then not be a preference study but rather one of efficiency. Perhaps a mixture as another variable. After a specified time, sift the vermicompost for castings and compare with unprocessed material. You can do both bulk and weight comparisons.

It was cool, Flamingo, lot of fun. Some of those tunnels were in complete darkness and we climbed up/through/down them sometimes coming out another way or up some narrow, twisting staircase or it would end in a dead end and we'd have to turn around and go back out the way we came. One of them was very short and narrow, wet flooring/dirt that sloped upward, it finally came out at the end but it was kinda scary at times. Sometimes it's nice to be short, but I did manage to hit my head a couple times. Some of the places were barred off so you weren't supposed to go down them but apparently the kids went anyway. I'm glad I wasn't nearby when they did it.

Neat... Those concrete slabs and the thing that looks like a concrete boat in pix 9 and 10? I think those are part of the British Mulberry Harbor and pier from the D-Day Invasion. The Allies needed a harbor in which they could land supplies for the troops after the invasion, but the established harbors were very heavily defended by the Germans. So, the Americans and British simply built two very functional harbors called Mulberries. They were towed across during the invasion, and after the beaches had been secured sunk and set up. Unfortunately the American engineers focused on speed rather than securing the sections of the harbor. They wanted to get it in operation as quickly as possible, while the British and Canadian took the time to properly secure their Mulberry. The American Mulberry was almost completely destroyed in a massive channel storm shortly after the invasion. The British Mulberry, while heavily damaged, was still usable.

That's really interesting Kath! I'd want to take the longer tour too. The beach makes me sad-I've seen it in so many movies. Danielle