The day after our bird dance and water experiment, Miss Yarrow told us all about citizen science. She explained that scientists are too busy to do all the research that they need to do, all themselves, so they need children like us to help them.

It was our job to carry out a survey from OPAL, that would let us see how many and what kind of worms were living areas of the school ground.

We had to follow the instructions carefully, to make sure that we dug the right size of ditch.  We worked as two teams (so we had two ditches). Next we searched through the soil and turf to see if we could find any worms.

The first group found 20 worms over all and the second group found 18. There was way more worms underground compared to the day before when we had to wait for them to surface.

It started pouring down, so we weren’t able to sort and classify our worms outdoors, but we used the photographs we had taken to discuss our findings once we were back inside. There were lots of different worms; some long, some short, some fat, some thin, some dark and some lighter. We think there was different species in the ditches.

Miss Yarrow has filled in our results and will send them off to the scientists at OPAL. Santa was pleased that we were responsible citizens and he liked that we care about science in Scotland.