KINDERGARTEN teacher Shi Yulan has seen her classroom — and her students — transformed. Just a year ago Shi’s classroom, which is located in a mountainous area of southwest China’s Chongqing Municipality, had no toys and the desks and chairs were castoffs from a nearby primary school. Worst of all, says Shi, “it used to be so dull,” recalling how the children once spent their days sitting in orderly rows, listening to her reading aloud from textbooks.

Today though, Shi’s students enjoy drawing and playing with building blocks and other educational toys. They also have more opportunities to explore their own interests.

Located in remote Zhongxian County, Jinsheng Kindergarten sits atop a 650-meter-tall hill. The school serves three nearby villages, and some children travel up to eight kilometers along twisting mountain roads 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. The program’s aims is to promote quality education for the most vulnerable children in China by providing training and professional guidance to their teachers.

Jinsheng Kindergarten was in the pilot scheme. In May and July 2014, Shi and the school’s two other teachers attended training programs.

They are the only teachers in the kindergarten, says headmaster Liu Yuan. As young people flock to big cities in search of job opportunities, it has become harder to recruit professional teachers in the village. Shi and her colleagues, who used to work at a silk factory in the county, have no formal teaching credentials. “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 personal development, and how her work is “not all about teaching knowledge, but about fostering children’s physical, cognitive, language, social and emotional abilities.”

With this lesson in mind, Shi and her peers set about transforming the kindergarten.

They set aside corners in each classroom for reading, music, art and crafts. They hung children’s artwork low along the walls, making sure to keep everything less than 1.2 meters from the floor. “It’s where the children can see it,” Shi explains. Slides and swings were set up in the playground.

They also made toys out of castoff materials. They strapped ring-pull cans together as stilts for the children to practice their balancing skills. They put sand in empty cans and sealed them: “Kids can shake them while singing.” They also abandoned their 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.

With a population of one million people, the county has 14 other pilot kindergartens, says Liang Wenzheng, an education official in Zhongxian County. With time, it’s hoped that the lessons learned at these schools can affect positive change at the dozens of other schools which dot the area.

“The idea of learning corners has been widely accepted,” Liang says. But for him, the shifts in teaching methods have been the most important changes.

“In the past, the kids learned from books and teachers, but now, they learn from games and by themselves,” he says.

In some rural preschools and kindergartens, school income is marginal and costs are cut where possible. Few have suitable equipment or furnishings for preschoolers and the curricula often emphasize rote learning.

This situation is aggravated by poorly trained teachers and a lack of professional development opportunities, says UNICEF project official Lou Chunfang. They work in overcrowded classes with little assistance, while most are unfamiliar with ECD.

But training for teachers is only part of the solution. Problems in the classroom require regular on-site visits and interventions, says Zhang Yinna, a preschool education researcher and one of the training experts in Zhongxian County. Zhang says about 35 on-site sessions were arranged last year.

However, some parents and guardians have been skeptical of the new program and its potential benefits.

Like other rural counties in China, Zhongxian has seen many young parents migrate to cities to work, leaving their children in the care of aging grandparents with more traditional ideas.

Community outreach is another part of the pilot program, which promotes “open days” where parents and guardians can visit kindergartens and talk to ECD experts themselves.

Li Shulan, 59, admits she often phoned the teacher in the past to ask her to assign more homework to her 5-year-old granddaughter. But after talking to experts, she realized that children should develop “in all aspects.”

Thanks to the school’s new methods, she says, her granddaughter talks more: “she tells me what happens in school every day.”

A recent survey released by UNICEF estimates that two-thirds of China’s 90 million children aged six and under still live in rural areas and get insufficient early childhood education.

The central government has endeavored to improve preschool education in underdeveloped areas. In 2010, the State Council issued its “Guiding Opinions on Pre-School Education,” and pledged an investment of 50 billion yuan (US$8 billion) to improve access to early childhood education in remote parts of the country.

But a major gap in teaching quality persists between rural and urban areas, and is in danger of widening further, says UNICEF China education specialist Chen Xuefeng.

A recent survey of the five proposed rural pilot sites, led by the National Institute of Education Sciences, Peking University and UNICEF, found that 38 percent of teachers lacked teaching licenses, while 75 percent of caregivers had no credentials.

The government needs to improve the ECD teacher-training system at the county level, Chen argues, and it must roll out policies to encourage professional urban teachers to participate in rural early education.

Shi Yulan is now working hard to become a better teacher. She hopes that her students too can broaden their horizons and walk out of the mountain one day as wholly-formed individuals with brilliant minds.