Living Root Garden School • Soil & the Underground • Name: ______________________
🔍 The Case
The case of the missing apple core — it went into the pile and vanished. Who ate it, and in what order?
Start with the superstar: roly-polies are crustaceans, not insects — land-dwelling cousins of shrimp, crabs, and lobsters. They breathe with gills, which only work when wet, so they always hide under damp logs and soggy leaves. A pillbug rolls into a perfect ball; a sowbug can only curl halfway and has two little tail spikes sticking out the back.
Springtails are not insects either — they catapult themselves into the air with a spring-loaded tail called a furcula, and they graze on fungi like tiny lawnmowers for mold. Mites are arachnids with eight legs, armored tanks so small you need a magnifier to see them properly.
Tell millipedes from centipedes by counting legs: millipedes have two pairs of legs per body segment and are gentle shredders; centipedes have one pair per segment, are fast and flat, and hunt with venom fangs that are really modified legs called forcipules.
The work runs like an assembly line: shredders rip big pieces into small ones, fungi and bacteria chemically dismantle them, grazers eat the microbes, predators keep everyone in check, and earthworms run the whole mess through their guts and package it as castings. Remove any one crew and the line slows down.
Ask: Which critter will you find the most of in your heap — the shredders, the grazers, or the hunters? Write your guess before you lift the lid.
Try: Take one magnifier safari through a heap or leaf pile and tally everything you find — roly-polies, springtails, mites, millipedes, centipedes, worms — then put everything back where you found it.
Stretch (Teens & Growers ready for more): Draw the heap's food web and trace one leaf from fresh to soil through at least four creatures, from shredder to worm.
Tell: Fill in the log below — date, your tally, your strangest find — then finish this sentence in words or a labeled drawing: “The leaf became soil because ___.”
Date
What I saw
What surprised me
Date: ____/____/____
Date: ____/____/____
Date: ____/____/____
Date: ____/____/____
🛠️ Build It
Draw your strangest safari discovery bigger than life, with labels for every leg, shell, or spot you noticed.
🗣️ Be the Teacher
Show someone your strangest-creature drawing and tell them why a roly-poly is a lobster, not a bug — in your own words, no reading off the packet.
🏅 I can…
☐ I can tell a millipede from a centipede by counting legs.
Portfolio check
☐ Guide read
☐ Case solved
☐ Ask, Try, Tell done
☐ Build It filed: Safari tally + strangest-creature sketch
☐ Taught someone
☐ Badge earned: I can tell a millipede from a centipede by counting legs.
Living Root Garden School • livingrootgarden.com/homeschool/ • Free — print as many copies as you like. File this sheet with your portfolio log. Sprouts do the Read, the Case, and Build It; Growers try the Ask, Try, Tell stretch when ready; Teens do the whole packet — including teaching it back.