On rainy days at ACS Elementary, students love to gross out the teachers on supervision by showing them big, fat worms.

To their giggling delight, the teachers respond as they hoped:“Ewwww! Gross!” Except when they bring the wiggling creatures to Nature Kindergarten teacher, Christine Beugelink. “Cool! Let me see!” she says, stopping them in their tracks, confused that she’s excited to check out the worms.

Let’s Take Them Outside!

Fresh out of university, Christine first taught French at ACS Elementary’s Clayburn Hills campus. Since then, she has worked at several Christian schools, in classrooms, in distributed learning, and at an outdoor school in Aldergrove Park.

In 2016, Christine returned to ACS Elementary, teaching French and providing kindergarten support every Friday, while the “K” teachers had their prep blocks.

She remembers being surprised at how much she looked forward to Fridays. “The students were really funny, and you could do silly things, and they’d laugh,” remembers Christine. “And because those Fridays were unique, I thought, ‘Let’s take them outside!’”

Four years later, Christine had the opportunity to teach her own part-time class. “I thought I’d like to call it Nature Kindergarten,” she says, “just because then the expectation is that kids in my class would come with boots and raincoats.” In her typical play-on-words humour, she adds, “I had incorrectly assumed every child in our wet coast…sorry, west coast would.”

The unique program is now in its fourth year at ACS. Christine’s hope for Nature Kindergarten goes far beyond just doing school outside. “I want students to see nature as God’s classroom, His original classroom,” she explains. “He wants us to care for it—not just go around picking up the trash off the playground, but also to nurture it, really appreciate it, care for it, notice it.”

Mud and Bugs

Her philosophy can be broken down into what she calls the three W’s: “We wander, and then we wonder at the creation we see, and then that leads us to worship our Creator God.”

It all starts with wandering. From the first day of kindergarten, Christine works to build up the physical stamina of her little ones. Slowly, she guides them from playing safely on the playground to running a lap around the track in their rubber boots. By the time they are ready to start exploring “their forest” at McKee Creek, their mental resilience has increased too.

“Eventually, when they get a boot full of water, they don’t cry about it. They actually walk back to the school with that wet, sloshy boot,” Christine says with a smile. “It just amazes me. I think adults would whine more quickly.”

She then coaches her students to wonder at God’s creation. “As soon as you pick something up and you look at it with wonder, you have a crowd of little faces around you,” she explains. “Suddenly this little seed enclosure you’re holding becomes a hedgehog because it’s prickly. And then you have their imagination sparked.”

Christine and her students will gather items on their walks, loose things like pine cones, rocks, and usually a bug of some sort. At the end of the walk, they lay their discoveries down on a little kerchief. They look carefully at their “log of wonder,” as they call it, and practice being curious. With magnifying glasses and bug boxes, they wonder and ask questions like, “Where’s the front and back of the worm?” and “What kind of habitat do you think it lives in?”

This is where Christine weaves together her curriculum with their explorations. Along with the obvious connections to science and Bible, Christine creatively ties in math, storytelling, sequencing, and everything else taught in kindergarten. Students learn to find the letters to spell what they find. If it’s acorn, they write an A on their journal drawing.

Her Heart of Worship

Naturally, all their wandering and wondering leads to worship. “I guess when you look at nature, and you see it with eyes of wonder, it leads you to worship the Creator and to realize that things may not always be going smoothly in your life, or whatever your circumstances, but there’s a lot of good in the world too. That’s God’s message of love and constant faithfulness.”

Christine shares her heart of worship with her students, teaching them that if God shows that much care and attention in a leaf, in a shell, or even the tiny salmon eggs, how much more has He done for us as His image bearers.

“At the end of the day, we’re all tired,” grins Christine. “We come back to the school and the kids are dirty, wet, and tired, but they’re smiling.”

Christine loves seeing that strength grow in them. “It’s hard sometimes to climb up a slope that’s slippery with wet weeds, but then we make it back to class and they give me a hearty high-five as they leave to go home.”

Not surprisingly, as the Nature Kindergarten students leave for the day, they are already asking, “When do we get to do Forest Friday again?”