Our primary focus is on frontline teachers in townships and villages, with a special attention to new teachers or "transferred teachers" who came from middle or primary schools responding to a national call to support kindergartens. As a fundamental link to the teachers of pre-school education, these new teachers are faced with the bottlenecks unimaginable to urban teachers: the scarcity of teaching resources and extremely heavy workload, they are inexperienced in leading pre-school children aged between three and six years old. Trapped in this bottleneck, many teachers gradually lost the drive to push through, and their career identity and sense of happiness were also compromised. It even creates a vicious circle, and negatively affect the child’s brain development.

To address the needs of these frontline teachers, on one hand, we developed a Three-Tiered System and Onsite Training (training based on individual kindergartens) method to provide a healthy ecosystem, so to ensure consistent and professional guidance for rural pre-school teachers. On the other hand, we develop curriculums that are localized, practical, and easy to adopt. Teachers experience a rapid improvement in their own abilities, and observe a corresponding improvement in the performance of their students. Gradually, more challenging lessons are introduced, further stimulating intellectual development and bolstering the confidence and satisfaction of teachers.

To provide professional guidance to frontline teachers, we must provide teachers with long-term training and guidance. And when they master the skills, they should return to the locals and provide support for each kindergarten. Therefore, we created an Onsite Teacher-Training System. First, the local education authority appoints a specialist to oversee local pre-school education. Working with this specialist, we identify county-level trainers and township backbone teachers. These select educators will be responsible for training frontline teachers at the township and village levels. Onsite training is a key factor in teacher education, which is why backbone teachers regularly return to their kindergartens, where they can demonstrate techniques and offer guidance to less experienced teachers.

This model fosters a sense of empowerment among teachers, enabling them to cope with the various challenges and vicissitudes of pre-school education, and ultimately transform the local pre-school education environment. From an administrative point of view, it facilitates the development of effective management mechanisms, whereby local professionals are available to offer full-time teacher training and guidance.

Not long after Thousand Trees was founded, we put together an R&D team to create teaching materials and classroom content tailored to the educational needs of rural, pre-school children. The team possessed an eclectic background, with expertise in a variety of disciplines, including psychology, anthropology, pre-school education, music education and history. Steering the R&D process are the National Three- to Six-Year-Old Child Development Guide, as well as extensive studies and research regarding the psychological development of children. Prior to wide-scale implementation, all ideas and materials from the R&D team are tested at our non-profit kindergarten, the Thousands Trees Children’s Home.

or the past five years, we have developed low-cost, high-quality, easy-to-use teaching materials and classroom activities that support curriculums tailored to rural pre-school children. With reading at the core, the materials integrate language, art, science, mathematics and health, and are augmented with music and action songs.