Hannah Powell – Norman Park Kindergarten QLD – AFSA Vice President
Spreading the nature play love…
Hi! I’m Hannah and I am one of the founding members of AFSA, am a kindy teacher and run my own bush kindy program at Norman Park Community Kindergarten. I have also established four other ongoing forest school programs currently running in Brisbane and co-facilitate bush kindy training with Cottonwood Learning (Nature Play Qld).
My exploration into the need for access to natural wild spaces began many years ago when I was working in a long day care setting and began to notice significant changes in the wellbeing of the children when they were in natural outdoor environments. I love to be super nerdy and so I began to deep dive into researching the benefits of nature immersion for children – I was completely blown away by what I found. Time spent in nature was beneficial for children in every single area, from neurological development to physical, from mental health and wellbeing to cognitive skills and executive functioning and so much more. Knowing this and also knowing many of the children in our program lived in apartment buildings (and spent most of their waking hours in our one childcare building) inspired me to push forward in getting our children out of our gates and into nature.
I was in the very first group of people in Australia to complete the forest school level 3 leader course through FSLI and, empowered with the “how”, set up the forest school program still running at Kurilpa Community Childcare – known as Bigi Molum (sun children in Yugerra). Following that, I have been passionate about supporting other educators to provide access to natural wild spaces for the children in their care through establishing other forest school programs and facilitating training. I strongly believe that all children need and deserve access to long periods of uninterrupted play in natural wild spaces in order to reap the innumerable benefits of this and I will continue to advocate for that in as many ways as possible while there are still children missing out.
When I am not advocating for nature immersion for children, I enjoy spending my time playing guitar, writing music, singing, writing articles, dancing, doing yoga, researching and giving talks to families and other kindergartens about my nerdy research findings (particularly in relation to neuroscience, psychology, running a child-led program and attachment theory), camping, hanging out in nature and spending time with my two teenagers. Life is busy and wonderful!
