In the recent Early Learning Feature in “The Age”,  Fiona Ireland, the Director of Early Learning at Lauriston, shared the benefits of the Bush Kindergarten program with Joanne Brookfield. 

The word kindergarten may conjure images of visually busy spaces with furniture, toys, books and artwork on the walls, however a ‘bush kinder’ is the wide, open opposite of that.

As the name suggests, schools with Early Learning Centres are increasingly educating their youngest students in the outdoors – or the “classroom without a ceiling” as Jeanette Russell, Early Learning Centre Director at Cornish College calls it.

Students at Cornish have a dedicated EcoCentre, which is for the benefit of all year levels. “The EcoCentre is part of the 100 acres of Bunurong natural parkland on which Cornish College is located. This amount of land enables children to learn with, in, from and for nature,” explains Russell.

Here the youngest children have access to structured spaces like a chicken coop, vegetable gardens and an orchard where they learn to look after the animals, collect eggs plus harvest vegetables and fruit that they then use in cooking.

“They can extend on ideas and knowledge they have learnt in the classroom as well as bringing back skills and understandings to the classroom,” she says. They also learn about the important cultural links the environment has to Indigenous and First Nations people through the Outdoor Learning Coordinator.

The ELC students at Cornish spend a morning each week learning and playing in nature, which includes getting wet and muddy, and climbing trees. “They build resilience, learning that it’s OK to be wet and maybe uncomfortable, but that doesn’t stop you from having fun and once we return to the classroom, they change into dry clothes.”

ELC students have a similar experience at Lauriston Girls’ School’s bush kinder, which is set in a natural bush environment although doesn’t have any facilities, play equipment or even a bathroom. “The educators bring in all the equipment needed, for instance, a portable toilet! However, children are encouraged to do ‘bush wees’,” explains Lauriston Director of Kindergarten Fiona Ireland of the sessions which take place from 9.30am-1.30pm.

Lauriston students can access ropes, tarpaulins, magnifying glasses and a set of fishing nets for when they go ponding, however the rest relies on their creativity, imagination, collaboration and sense of play.

“Research has told us that the two things children need is to be dry and to not be hungry and then mostly they can cope with anything,” says Ireland of how these planned play experiences build myriad life skills and dispositions for learning.

“Immersion in the sensory and informational richness and dynamic qualities of the bush, builds basic learning responses such as identification, differentiation, analysis, and evaluation,” she says, giving as examples that they learn to distinguish a magpie from a duck; develop quantitative skills by counting flowers; gain materials knowledge from playing in grass and mud; and even create ephemeral art by using “all the treasures they find in the undergrowth”.

While it looks and feels like play to the ELC students, educators have a body of evidence that indicates that contact with nature remains vital to child development. As Ireland notes, “a bush environment, a seashore or a forest is an immersive experience, engaging and challenging the whole child physically, socially, cognitively and emotionally.”