2022
04/25
The Yuepu Reading Project, jointly initiated by the Snow Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the CEREC Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and the Chen Yidan Foundation, has been launched in Beichuan Qiang Autonomous County, Sichuan Province. Recently, the project completed two important tasks locally: teacher training and student reading level assessments, providing support for designing and implementing reading courses that better fit the local conditions.
The project aims to cultivate a team of early reading teacher volunteers locally through the innovative picture book curriculum and mature training system developed by the CEREC Lab over years of practice in rural China. This team will bring high-quality picture book resources and experiential courses to children aged 3-6 in the community, guiding parents to pay attention to preschool children’s growth and education, thereby promoting the implementation of the family-society collaboration. The project is also another public welfare initiative by the Chen Yidan Foundation, following Yuepu Music Space, providing comprehensive quality education for rural children, and serving the educational needs of local families and communities.
Early Reading’s Impact on Children’s Development: Picture Books as a Valuable Resource for Holistic Development
The project is led and executed by a team of Professor Catherine Snow from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Postdoctoral Researcher Dr. Chen Si, a postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Professor Snow is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an internationally renowned expert in children’s language and literacy development. She has conducted extensive and rigorous research on children’s language and psychological development through reading, from context to process, proving that high-quality early reading significantly promotes children’s growth.
Prof. Catherine Snow
Dr. Chen Si
In this project, picture books serve as a key medium throughout. The reading curriculum provided by the project covers the five domains required by the Guidelines for the Learning and Development of Children Aged 3-6 in China, including language, science and mathematical cognition, social, art, and health. The curriculum has been adjusted in structure and content based on feedback from teacher training and local children’s reading level assessment data to better align with the characteristics and needs of local families and children.
Focus on Teacher Professional Growth: Ensuring Long-Term Benefits of Early Reading Classes
The project starts with training local teachers to enhance their ability to conduct early reading courses, promoting long-term professional growth. The main reasons for this are: first, solid course content needed to be effectively delivered through professional teaching, which inevitably depends on teachers; second, for the project to operate healthily and sustainably, it is necessary to consider how to enable local educational resources to become “self-sufficient”.
From April 12 to 20, 2022, the project conducted seven online and offline training sessions for 19 local teacher volunteers, focusing on interaction strategies between teachers and children. The training guided teachers to ask high-quality questions in class to inspire children’s thinking and discussion. The teacher volunteers responded enthusiastically, with some expressing a new understanding of picture book teaching, finding the practical courses to be highly applicable, and looking forward to applying what they learned in future classes.
The project will launch weekend classes in three communities of Beichuan Qiang Autonomous County on April 30, 2022. The project will continue to enrich picture book resources for local communities by partnering with schools in Shenzhen, providing better high-quality preschool education services for local children, guiding local families and communities to focus on the positive impact of innovative educational methods on children’s comprehensive quality development, and exploring more possibilities for family-community collaboration.
