Bush Kindy Australia

In this episode of the Learn Play Thrive podcast, host Simone Brand sits down with Bec Burch, the visionary founder of Bush Kindy Australia. As Australia’s leading provider of Bush Kindy Leader Training and nature pedagogy professional development, Bec mentors educators nationwide to build confident, compliant, and meaningful nature-based programs.

Grounded in her daily, hands-on work with children on the Gold Coast, Bec shares her passionate belief in every child's right to play outdoors, sharing how immersive nature play builds resilience, emotional well-being, and vital ecological literacy.

Together, Simone and Bec unpack what Bush Kindy looks like in everyday practice and how nature pedagogy seamlessly aligns with core early childhood frameworks. Addressing common barrier entry points, Bec offers practical and accessible ways for space-constrained or urban services without direct bush access to integrate natural elements into their programs.

Tune in to discover how connecting young learners with the natural world—regardless of your setting's location—can transform your pedagogical approach and spark lifelong wonder in the children you teach.

Find out more:
https://bushkindyaustralia.com.au/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:01

Welcome to Learn Play Thrive the podcast, the ultimate early learning podcast for educators and leaders in the sector. Let's learn, play, and thrive together.

SPEAKER_00 0:11

The Learn Play Thrive podcast was recorded on the land with the Dark and Jung people. We pay our respects to the traditional custodians, past, present, and emerging. Hands up, hands down, clear on dark and young lands.

SPEAKER_02 0:24

Hello and welcome to Learn Play Thrive the podcast, where we dive deep into the heart of early childhood education and care and the inspirational educators, researchers, and sector leaders who make it happen. I'm your host, Simone Brand. We are coming to you today with a very special episode recording live from the ECA Regional, Rural and Remote Forum in beautiful Coffs Harbour. Today we're chatting with Beck Birch from Bush Kindy Australia. Beck Birch is the founder of Bush Kindy Australia, Australia's leading provider of Bush Kindy leader training and nature pedagogy professional development. She mentors and trains educators nationwide, empowering teams to embed confident, compliant, and meaningful nature-based practice. Alongside this work, Beck leads Cottonwood Learning on the Gold Coast, maintaining a hands-on grassroots nature play in action, ensuring her national training remains grounded in lived-in practice. Beck is a strong advocate for children's right in play in nature, believes connection to natural world brings resilience, well-being, and ecological literacy for both children and educators. Thank you so much for coming on to the podcast. Really appreciate your time at Navorum wondering how busy it's been over the last couple of days. Could you share with our listeners a bit about what Bush Kindy Australia is?

SPEAKER_01 1:35

Yeah, so we are a group of facilitators that are very passionate about getting children outdoors in nature. So we are experts in nature pedagogy, forest school, bush kindy in nature play. All of our facilitators are not only supporting educators to enrich their learning and their knowledge and skills, but we also all work in the field. So we all still work with children in a bush or a beach kitty program. So we're still facing all of the challenges that educators are as well, whether that's bad weather or environmental disasters or just the challenges of navigating community spaces and buses and things like that. And for our team at Bushkinny Australia, we travel everywhere, particularly regional areas. It's probably our passion is kind of reaching all of those places that there's not always typically a lot of access to professional development. So we spend a lot of time traveling across all of the states and we go into services and deliver very customized and tailored programs for them. And that might look like a one-day workshop on a Saturday with all their team. It might be a mentor program with their leadership team. Sometimes we do some online things and we also do public workshops. So we'll venture off to major and you know regional cities and put on workshops where anyone, it might just be where one or two people from a center want to come along and learn about nature pedagogy or stepping outside that fence in those excursions.

SPEAKER_02 3:01

I can imagine with your range of uh access, there would be a variety of different ways that you access nature and environments. What are some of the differences that you've seen across forests?

SPEAKER_01 3:15

Yeah, I think that's the beautiful thing about Bush Kindy and nature programs in Australia. I think we've all been influenced from kind of the forestry model that's come from like Scandinavia and UK, but it's they're quite different programs overseas. And in Australia, it's really contextualized to our communities. And so for one centre, it might be just doing nature play and even the Bush Kindy kind of elements within the fence because they don't have access to a bus, or they might not have the staffing to go outside the fence. There can be lots of reasons why that might happen. And for others, it is going onto their own private land. There's more and more services that are actually building or buying large blocks of land that they can explore Bush Kindy in. Sometimes it might be accessing community reserves and parks or a creek or private land. We also find some amazing services are really creative and kind of tapping into like guides halls and scouts halls or school property church sites and things like that, where there's these just pockets of nature that aren't really being utilized by anyone. So what I love is seeing the real diversity that we have across all of our services in Australia. And then also how they go about doing it, you know, and for some, it might be just putting babies in a pram and going for a walk for 45 minutes, some it might be going out for a couple of hours, and some programs go out for five hours, you know, or all day. And I think that's the beautiful thing about it in Australia, in that we don't have this kind of cookie sort of model where we all have to be the same and doing the same thing. It can kind of be where our staff team is at in their journey, you know, the logistics of our services and staffing rosters and things like that. And everybody can just do what is contextualized and right for their particular program.

SPEAKER_02 5:00

What does bush kindy look like in practice and how does it relate to early childhood pedagogy?

SPEAKER_01 5:05

Yeah. Bushkindy is an interesting word because essentially it's about an excursion going outside the fence. It's kind of the term that we're all using in Australia. But the interesting thing is not often bush, and it's often not kindy. You know, it can be preschool, it can be bush, it can just be a nature reserve, it can be creeks, rainforests, beaches, all sorts of different things. So Bush Kindi is essentially heading outside into nature and what we might call a nature immersion program and implementing that nature pedagogy. And so essentially the key elements of nature pedagogy are things like child-led play, lots of inquiry-based learning where we're using that, you know, sense of curiosity that drives all those questions that then leads to investigations and researching, and in particular about flora and fauna of the local environment. And that's the beautiful thing about when we do get to step outside the fence and explore those community spaces that you know we're coming across different plants or different bugs and different birds and co-learning with children about all of that and just so much discovery. And so it really leads into that inquiry-based learning that is a key part of that nature pedagogy. I guess the other components of pedagogy in those programs is around risky play. It's a key element, you know, when children might be out in the weather, jumping in mud puddles, climbing trees, playing with sticks, all those wonderful things. And lots of those times that things happen in a centre as well. But risky play is definitely a big part of nature pedagogy.

SPEAKER_02 6:37

For services who don't have access to the push, how can they integrate nature into their programs?

SPEAKER_01 6:42

Yeah, and lots can't for many different reasons. And essentially, it is just nature pedagogy, and we can implement that anywhere. And you know, I always encourage, and our training centers around embedding it within your center practices first and foremost, before stepping out beyond the fence, that we want to have nature pedagogy implemented across all of the age groups, all of the rooms, both indoor and outdoor, where all staff are confident in implementing that nature pedagogy before you start then taking it outside the fence where it's more risky. And so it's thinking about well, how can we infuse nature into everything that we do? You know, it might just be even when we're doing play-doh is instead of using some plastic rolling pins, can we go get the Banksia seed pods? They make great prints. Can we use big gum nut seed pods? Can we even maybe colour the play-doh with some natural dyes? And it might be particular flowers that they might bash up with a mortar and pestle, it might be mud, it might be some charcoal. So it's just thinking about all of the experiences that we're providing with children. How can we infuse nature into those spaces? You know, we often have plastic or laminated money. Can we just use leaves and different coloured leaves, different sized leaves for the different amounts? Children in my sessions talk about the yellow leaves are always a million dollars because they look like gold. And they're rare. Yeah. So there's, you know, lots of ways that we can start thinking about how can we bring nature into our classroom spaces? Think about the collage trolley, you know, we all spend lots of money in our resource budget on pider pop sticks and pom-poms and all sorts of a range of things, as well as recycle things. But can we incorporate more nature into those spaces? And then I guess the other ways of interweaving bush kindy within the fence is like what can we do out in a playground spaces? And you know, our playgrounds look different. For some of us, we're in established centres with amazing big trees that we can climb and there's leaves dropping and lots of nature's loose parts. For other services, they're newly built or their playground might be on a third-story building, but we can still bring nature into those spaces. You know, we've seen where services have built like forest play on a third-story building because they've brought big pots in, grown lily pillies, put stuff on top of astro turf, and also just thinking about what we can learn out in our playground did what nature is already out there. Like it might just be the magpie that comes and you know pecks at morning tea and picks up all of the crumbs. What can we learn about that magpie rather than just shooing it away? It might be the trail of ants that goes on a fence, it might be butterflies that come and land on the tree that's overhanging from the neighbours. Like there's actually lots of opportunities to learn about nature in our playground spaces, but we often miss it. So nature pedagogy is just about putting that lens on of seeing what we can learn with and in nature in all of those spaces in indoor and out. So yeah, Bushkinny doesn't have to be always about going outside the fence because that's not always attainable for everybody in every service.

SPEAKER_02 9:46

So when we're talking about utilising resources and tools in nature, what balance or when do you you find that it's a a positive note to bring into children's play or risky play? What do they look like? What are some examples that you notice within your training that work really well for children?

SPEAKER_01 10:04

Yeah, so what resources do we want to bring? And look, there's no rule or regulation that says, you know, what we can and can't use. People always ask about like, what can I take to Bushkin? What am I not allowed to take? And there is no rule. It's thinking about why we're going outside the fence to Bushkini and it's to explore and learn something that is different that we can't get within the fence. And then are there other tools or resources that could support that? And sometimes things like magnifiers are amazing. You know, our children found a dead spider stuck on a tree and they zoomed in and found and discovered that it had eight eyes and took photos of it. And that started a whole exploration about what else don't we know about spiders? What else can we explore and investigate? It might be reference books. You know, we've all got amazing libraries, but often there are once upon a time and happy ending kind of stories. You know, do we have some reference books that tell us information about like our strain native flora and fauna, like our birds and our bugs? And you know, we have a lot of those books where children can then go off and get the spider book and come back and go, well, what spider is this? Can we identify it? Can we learn about it? Is it poisonous? Is it not? So the literacy element. Yeah, bringing in the literacy element. I think you know, essentially we want to keep children off screens or at least moderate that when we're out in nature. But then there's also some really valuable apps that you can use. iNaturalist is an amazing one that you can use in your playground space. And if you don't know what a particular bird is or a tree, even fungi, bugs, anything like that, they can take a photo and submit it, and the scientists will get back to them and let them know what it is. So, you know, I think there's lots of things, but it's always coming back to like why are we adding those extra resources? Where are the children's learning going? How can we extend that? But yeah, I think definitely there's a few little things that you can bring along and that help learn more about that flora and fauna in particular.

SPEAKER_02 11:58

Well, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast today. It's been an absolute pleasure, and I'm very much looking forward to bringing my digital microscope back to my team and exploring maybe some spiders, but also maybe some leaves and some patterns in nature. So thank you so much for coming on, really appreciate it. No worries, my pleasure working with you again. Thank you. Thank you for joining us on this episode of Learn Playthrive the podcast. We hope you found inspiration and valuable insights to fuel your journey in early childhood education. Remember the key to fostering learning, promoting play, and empowering young minds lies with your dedication and creativity. Stay connected between episodes by following us on Instagram at learnplaythrive underscore and join the conversation on Facebook at LearnPlaythrive Australia. If you've enjoyed today's episode, please like, subscribe, rate or review our podcast on your favourite platform. Your feedback helps us to continue to deliver content that resonates with you. And don't forget to visit us at our website at learnplaythrive.com.au for additional resources, blog posts, and professional development opportunities. Until next time, keep learning, keep playing, and keep thriving. We'll see you in the next episode of Learn Playthrive the podcast.