Having just had my hair cut and a manicure at the Hilton hotel for the princely sum of £7.94, and consumed an ice cream (it is 25 degrees and sunny), I have found a bench under a tree to begin a blog. Although this hotel has seen better days, it is a pleasant respite from city life and the Bingham compound.

Teachers at Bingham come and go. Some stay for a short time others for longer but the average term is two years. We have already passed that particular milestone so I guess that makes us ‘long-termers’. Every year an order for resources is placed in January, but doesn’t usually arrive until the end of the school year. Hence items are sometimes ordered with good intentions but are never actually utilized as a teacher has come to the end of their term of service. This is probably why I found a wormery the other day in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet. It was pristine and came complete with instructions and substrate.

I was keen to make use of this find especially as ‘Tiny Creatures’ is our current topic in KG1. The tricky part was finding worms. Whereas in the damp British climate worms are never far from the surface or hiding under rocks or logs, here they proved far more elusive. I asked the gardeners and a visitor who is currently working with the gardeners, but to no avail. I was relating this difficulty to my teaching assistant who took on the case and described what we needed to one of the grounds men herself. Thus it was, that partway through one morning he arrived with a cut-off plastic bottle containing a whole variety of creatures, beetles (some very bright colours), woodlice, centipedes, millipedes and some others that I couldn’t identify. Sadly they all had legs and there wasn’t a worm in sight.  My class however were fascinated and we all had a good look and identified some of them in a book. I have since learned the Amharic word for worm, it is simply ‘til’ – one to remember for the future.

That lunchtime I printed a couple of pictures of earthworms from the internet. When he came back to collect the bottle my helpful minibeast supplier noticed the photos on the table, became very animated and disappeared out of the door. It wasn’t long before he returned, this time with a glass jar, “bazoo” (many) he said triumphantly as he handed me the jar with a smile. I made up the wormery with the class and slid it into the cardboard outer sleeve with a promise to look again the very next day. As they arrived the children could hardly contain their excitement in anticipation of the ‘big reveal’. Sure enough they were not disappointed as tunnels could be identified against the Perspex sides of the wormery and they could see some of the worms moving. So the wormery is now in pride of place next to tadpoles who are ‘still hanging on in there’, but without any sign of a single limb yet. That doesn’t stop individuals using the magnifying glasses to inspect them each day with several convinced that they have spotted the first leg! Proof I guess that the magic of life and creation is not limited in it’s appeal, but pervades the whole world.