Kindergarten teacher Shi Yulan has seen her classroom - and the children - transformed.
In the classroom in a mountain village in China's southwestern Chongqing Province, the kids enjoy drawing, building blocks and playing with other toys. But, says Shi, just a year ago, the class had no toys, and the desks and chairs were castoffs from a primary school.
Worst of all, "it used to be so dull," says Shi, 46, recalling how the children once sat in orderly rows, listening to her reading textbooks.
In remote Zhongxian County, Chongqing Municipality, Jinsheng Kindergarten sits atop a 650-meter hill. It is the only kindergarten for three nearby villages. Some kids travel 8 kilometers along a twisting mountain road to get there.
In 2013, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and China's Ministry of Education initiated an early childhood development (ECD) project in five remote counties across five western provincial areas, aiming to promote quality education for the most vulnerable children in China by providing training and supervision to their teachers.
Jinsheng Kindergarten was in the pilot scheme. In May and July 2014, Shi and the other two teachers attended training programs.
They are the only teachers in the kindergarten, says headmaster Liu Yuan. As young people move to big cities, it becomes harder to recruit professional teachers in the village. Shi and her colleagues, who used to work in a silk factory in the county, have no teaching certificates.
"Despite that, they are dedicated to their work," Liu says.
The six-day training program broadened Shi's horizons. She learned how important early childhood is in child development, and how her work is "not all about learning knowledge, but about fostering children's physical, cognitive, language, social and emotional abilities."
The teachers set about transforming the kindergarten under the guidance of their training experts.
They divided the classroom into books, music, art, and building corners. They displayed children's artwork on the wall below the 1.2-meter height. "It's where the children can see it," Shi explains. Slides and swings were set up in the playground.
They made toys out of waste materials. They strapped ring-pull cans together as stilts for the kids to practice balancing skills. They put sand in empty cans and sealed them: "Kids can shake them while singing."
They also abandoned old ways of teaching. "Now I make up stories and demonstrate with pictures. Kids love it, and they are much more active than before," Shi says.
The timetable changed too. Most of the time, kids are free to choose a corner and learn by themselves. The class is no longer dominated by teachers.
