🎓 Skills Your Child Will Develop

• 🎨 Creativity & Self-Expression — Making freely chosen creative decisions — which colors, shapes, and materials to use — develops a child's personal artistic voice and the confidence to express original ideas across all areas of life.
• 🌈 Color & Pattern Recognition — Selecting, mixing, and arranging colors and patterns sharpens visual discrimination — the ability to notice subtle differences — which transfers directly to letter and number recognition in early literacy and math.
• 📐 Spatial Reasoning — Three-dimensional crafts — paper folding, cardboard construction, clay sculpting — develop the spatial intelligence children need for geometry, engineering, and understanding how physical objects relate in space.
• 💬 Vocabulary Expansion — Craft activities introduce rich domain-specific vocabulary: fold, crease, overlap, layer, press, symmetrical, transparent. Children who acquire craft vocabulary develop stronger descriptive language across all contexts.

The Worms in the Dirt  preschool food craft makes an excellent supplement to nature or science lessons about earthworms or soil. Your preschooler can make Worms in the Dirt with very little help from you. It’s a great companion to the How to Build a Worm Farm preschool science activity.

Materials you will Need

1 package of instant chocolate pudding made according to directions
1 package gummy worms
Chocolate wafers
Spotted jelly beans
Green fruit roll up
Green sugar or shredded coconut
6  6-oz. clear plastic cups
Gallon size zipper style food storage bag
Rolling pin, jar, or mallet
Sharp kitchen knife and cutting board (for use by parent)

How to Make It

Step 1: (Parent step)
Before your preschooler begins this craft, prepare the green fruit roll up to be “grass”. Do this by chilling the fruit roll up in your freezer for about ten seconds. Then place it on the cutting board and thinly slice it still rolled up. Don’t worry about the paper or plastic in the middle. You should be able to slice right through it with a sharp knife. You can take it out when the roll up thaws and is unrolled. Set aside the roll up slices for later in the craft.

Step 2:
Make pudding according to directions. Let your preschooler pour in the milk and do the stirring.

Step 3:
Divide the pudding into six cups.

Step 4:
Put make holes in the pudding using carefully wash hands or the handle tip of a spoon. Put the gummy worms down in the holes and bury them. Save one worm for each cup.

Step 5:
Put the chocolate wafers into the zipper bag. Squeeze out all the extra air before closing. Leave open about an inch so it doesn’t explode.

Step 6:
Roll the wafers into fine crumbs with the rolling pin or jar or pound them to crumbs with the mallet.

Step 7:
Sprinkle the chocolate crumbs over the over the pudding.

Step 8:
Sprinkle sugar or coconut over the crumbs.

Step 9:
Unroll the green fruit roll up strips. Using scissors dipped in sugar, but them into short lengths and stand them in “dirt” to look like grass.

Step 10:
Add the spotted jelly beans to be rocks.

Step 11:
Place the final worm in each cup, partially in and partially out of the “dirt” and with its head resting on one of the “rocks”.

 

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I'm Margaret Studer, the Preschool Crafts writer for PreschoolRock.com. In addition to crafts, I enjoy writing, children, cooking, and cats. I love to hear from my readers, so please share your preschool craft ideas with me. If you have any suggestions, ideas, or questions about this site, please contact me.

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