On rainy days at ACS Elementary, students love to gross out the teachers on supervision by showing them big, fat worms.<\/p>\n
To their giggling delight, the teachers respond as they hoped:\u201cEwwww! Gross!<\/em>\u201d Except when they bring the wiggling creatures to Nature Kindergarten teacher, Christine Beugelink. \u201cCool! Let me see!<\/em>\u201d she says, stopping them in their tracks, confused that she\u2019s excited to check out the worms.<\/p>\n Fresh out of university, Christine first taught French at ACS Elementary\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n In 2016, Christine returned to ACS Elementary, teaching French and providing kindergarten support every Friday, while the \u201cK\u201d teachers had their prep blocks.<\/p>\n She remembers being surprised at how much she looked forward to Fridays. \u201cThe students were really funny, and you could do silly things, and they’d laugh<\/em>,\u201d remembers Christine. \u201cAnd because those Fridays were unique, I thought, \u2018Let’s take them outside!<\/em>\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Four years later, Christine had the opportunity to teach her own part-time class. \u201cI thought I’d like to call it Nature Kindergarten,<\/em>\u201d she says, \u201cjust because then the expectation is that kids in my class would come with boots and raincoats.<\/em>\u201d In her typical play-on-words humour, she adds, \u201cI had incorrectly assumed every child in our wet coast\u2026sorry, west coast would.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n The unique program is now in its fourth year at ACS. Christine\u2019s hope for Nature Kindergarten goes far beyond just doing school outside. \u201c<\/strong><\/span>I want students to see nature as God’s classroom, His original classroom<\/span><\/strong>,<\/em>\u201d<\/strong> <\/span>she explains. \u201cHe wants us to care for it\u2014not just go around picking up the trash off the playground, but also to nurture it, really appreciate it, care for it, notice it.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n Her philosophy can be broken down into what she calls the three W\u2019s: \u201cWe wander, and then we wonder at the creation we see, and then that leads us to worship our Creator God<\/em>.\u201d<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n 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 \u201ctheir forest\u201d at McKee Creek, their mental resilience has increased too.<\/p>\n \u201cEventually, 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,<\/em>\u201d Christine says with a smile. \u201cIt just amazes me. I think adults would whine more quickly.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n She then coaches her students to wonder at God\u2019s creation. \u201cAs soon as you pick something up and you look at it with wonder, you have a crowd of little faces around you<\/em>,\u201d she explains. \u201cSuddenly this little seed enclosure you\u2019re holding becomes a hedgehog because it\u2019s prickly. And then you have their imagination sparked<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u201clog of wonder,\u201d as they call it, and practice being curious. With magnifying glasses and bug boxes, they wonder and ask questions like, \u201cWhere\u2019s the front and back of the worm?<\/em>\u201d and \u201cWhat kind of habitat do you think it lives in?<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Naturally, all their wandering and wondering leads to worship. \u201cI 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\u2019s God’s message of love and constant faithfulness.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cAt the end of the day, we\u2019re all tired,<\/em>\u201d grins Christine. \u201cWe come back to the school and the kids are dirty, wet, and tired, but they’re smiling.<\/em>\u201d<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Christine loves seeing that strength grow in them. \u201cIt’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.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n Not surprisingly, as the Nature Kindergarten students leave for the day, they are already asking, \u201cWhen do we get to do Forest Friday again?<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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:\u201cEwwww! Gross!\u201d Except when they bring the wiggling creatures to Nature Kindergarten teacher, Christine Beugelink. \u201cCool! Let me see!\u201d she says, stopping them in their […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7637,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,33],"tags":[],"post_folder":[],"class_list":["post-9368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-project-based-learning","category-elementary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9368\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9368"},{"taxonomy":"post_folder","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_folder?post=9368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Let’s Take Them Outside!<\/h2>\n
Mud and Bugs<\/h2>\n
Her Heart of Worship<\/h2>\n