No. of Beneficiaries: 200,000  children  and 10,000 teachers in rural kindergartens.

The Leping Rural Preschool Education Quality Improvement Project was implemented by the  Early Childhood Education Division (Thousand Trees Equal Education), Leping Social Entrepreneur Foundation. The project has already been carried out in five phases. In the 1^st phase, it only provided teaching activity programs and teacher training for rural kindergartens in Hubei Province. But, in the last two phases of the project, it has expanded to five more provinces, including Yunnan Province, Guizhou Province, Gansu Province, Sichuan Province, and Qinghai Province.

In order to improve the quality of preschool education for a large number of rural children, Leping’ Early Childhood Education Division has been making efforts to dig “rural child-appropriate learning content ” and “appropriate teaching methods for rural kindergarten teachers”. The former focuses on improving the basic ability of children’s lifelong learning—reading, because  child-appropriate picture book reading  and listening to stories would improve children’s ability to observe images, accumulate vocabulary, actively express themselves, and build up their reading interests. While the later is mainly to develop the teacher’s ability to carry out relevant teaching activities through three-tier teacher training . However, with the development of kindergartens in rural areas in recent years, the demand for kindergartens has gradually changed, and the methods for development of project teachers’ ability are also facing new challenges. In the new phase of the project, Leping Early Childhood Education Division hopes to meet the demands of a large number of initially-developed rural kindergartens by providing more multi-dimensional development activities for rural children with  reading still at the core, and newly-co-developed rural child-appropriate activities such as art handwork, corner games added. In terms of the development of teachers’ ability, on the one hand, the project  would continue to drive the local education bureaus and universities in the project regions  to assume more important leading roles in the implementation of project, and make plans that are tailored to local special needs; on the other hand, the project would develop online teaching content and platform  (Including online micro-courses, WeChat community, etc.) to promote  the classroom teachers’  ability directly , thus greatly reducing content attenuation caused by multi-tier training.

The Macao Tong Chai Charity Association provides funding for the project’s development of new activities, activity content and online training content, and buildup and learning of its  working team.