Brown Hill's bush kinder pioneer Christine Sullivan will retire this week after a 40-year teaching career
Christine Sullivan will miss her days in the bush and the excited little faces urging her to come and look at their latest discovery or construction.
But the Brown Hill Kindergarten teacher is looking forward to more time for family, travel and hobbies when she retires and walks out of kinder for the last time on Friday.
For the past 14 and a half years Ms Sullivan has helped the preschoolers of Brown Hill get ready for school and in 2012 introduced Ballarat's first bush kinder program - one of the first of its kind in the state.
CUBBY: Brown Hill bush kinder kids build a shelter near the Yarrowee River last year. Picture: Kate Healy
At bush kinder the children play with sticks, jump in puddles, climb trees, scramble around logs, dig in the mud and all the things that risk-averse parents usually say no to.
But as Ms Sullivan explains, the freedom and connection to the environment is great for a child's mental and physical health, education, resilience and much more, in addition to building the next generation of nature lovers and environmentalists.
Ms Sullivan pioneered bush kinder in Ballarat from an idea to a fully-fledged program in a little over a year.
A trial bush kinder program was run in Melbourne in 2011 and the following year the Brown Hill bush kinder began, giving pupils one four-hour session a week in a large track of bushland along the Yarrowee River, a short walk from kinder.
Christine Sullivan.
"Because of our setting right in the middle of such a wonderful environment, we always said we needed to find a way to have a greater connection to it rather than just a walk every now and then," Ms Sullivan said.
"Bush kinder really embeds us and the kids right in to our natural environment. It's given them a much greater awareness of what's going on around them; watching the level of the river, watching the trees blossom, the seasons change, the birds, animals and land."
The bush kinder program has had many visitors and researchers keen to learn more about the program and its benefits, and the bush kinder concept is now widespread through early childhood education across the state.
"Bush kinder also links in to the Indigenous connection to the land, giving children a greater understanding of how Indigenous people would have connected to it and lived from it."
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Ms Sullivan's first kindergarten teaching position after she graduated 40 years ago was at Angurugu, an Aboriginal community on Groote Eylandt in the Northern Territory.
She then became a kinder teacher at the Royal Children's Hospital before working at various preschools south east of Melbourne.
A stint working with VicRoads to support kinders and early childhood centres teaching traffic safety education came next before she eventually returned to the Northern Territory.
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After moving to Ballarat to be near family, Ms Sullivan began working at Haddon in 2004 before moving to Brown Hill later that year. The first groups of kinder kids she taught at Brown Hill have this year graduated from year 12 and Ms Sullivan decided now would be a "nice time to go."
"It's pretty amazing to see them grown up but they are always five to me," she laughed. On Friday, current and former Brown Hill Kinder pupils and families got together to celebrate Ms Sullivan's contribution to their lives and the community.
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