Taichung City Government-Education-Corner of Love ─Taichung City Taian Elementary School

"Daddy Bear and small animals who enjoy reading, girls and chinchillas who are stepping on the rainbow and running toward the scholarly garden, and children who are making wishes against the stars, are all telling a story of love ......."
After the new buildings of Taian Elementary School were completed, all the students are moved into the new classrooms but the library remained in the old place. In between the old and new buildings, there is the playground, which our students had to rush across in the ten-minute break between classes if they wanted to borrow and return books. Imagine what they had to do in the ten-minute break: They had to run one hundred meters across the playground and rushed up and down the stairs back and forth. Our children were quite often seen falling down to the ground with the books tumbling. What could we do to prevent such an event from occurring again and again?
Once helping a kid student pick up some books from the ground, our principal had an idea popping up, "We need to find some reading rooms in the new building for the kids!" Nevertheless, all the classrooms in the new building are fully occupied. It is very difficult to find spare room for the library. During a brainstorming session, our idea hamster Director Ding Jun suggested, "Why not using the turning corners of the stairways as reading rooms?" The idea was immediately agreed by everyone.
Acting as our Artistic Director, aunt Yan Fang took up the key role in collecting ideas from everyone and designing the “reading corners”. She depicted the blueprint: The reading corners on the second floor for the first to the fourth graders should be arranged in a lovely and warm atmosphere; those on the third floor for the fifth and sixth graders who are in the middle of fast growth should be decorated in a more or less liberated way; those on the fourth floor where computers and multi-purpose classrooms are located should highlight the spirit of positive exploration and modern technology; all the surrounding floors should be paved with wash pebbles and decorated with crystal mosaic and bookcases in the same color.
Siying, our elder sister, printed out the colorful posters by computer graphics, rushed in to glue them during the holidays, and finally finished the decoration of the “reading corners”. "Wow! How beautiful!" exclaimed our kids when they looked at the masterpieces just finished by Siying, who has turned the former gray-cement wall into the beautiful murals and shiny rainbow crystal tiles. Under the request of our kids, we had them paint the chairs. Aunt Suyue and aunt Ami volunteered to make paints, which were applied by kids to “dress” up the chairs. It was hot summer days. Kids sweated. Paint stained their hands, cheeks and clothes. However, they were happy in seeing flowers and butterflies emerging one by one through their brushes and the “reading corners” turning alive under their strokes.
For the next step, we tried to collect as many books as possible. Our kids were encouraged to donate books that they had read, while Parents Association took the initiative to buy a lot of new books. "Three Little Pigs is my favorite story book!” said Yu-ting. "Harry Potter has the most powerful broom in Hogwarts...." said Jiayu. Both of them generously donated their beloved books. Volunteers carefully handled those second-hand books donated by our kids. Some of them even looked like completely new books after the rearrangement. Books were then allocated to each floor in accordance with the grade levels of our kids and put into such categories as language, nature, art and others. On the fourth floor, there are chess and “Go” boards in a hope to prompt our kids to think in conjunction with the theme of “exploration”.
Inside the reading corner, children in the first to the fourth grades are arranged to sit in a circle. Their small figures seem to melt down into the mural, in which Daddy Bear, Baby Bunny and Brother Piggy are reading together with them. In the reading corner of the fifth and sixth graders, our students look like sitting on a dream train heading for the Rainbow Forest. Those kids who love to think look like little philosophers in the mural. In the small reading corners of Taian Elementary School, you will definitely find the wisdom of love pooled together by everyone!
A Profile of Taian Elementary School Founded in 1957, Taichung City Taian Elementary School is like an exquisite park in an urban city although it is located in the suburban area. Our school has a wide, green and lush space, rich in flora and fauna, in which our children are aroused of their curiosity to explore Nature, provided with the best perspective to develop their potential, and immersed in the simple atmosphere of the campus to shape their enthusiastic and diligent personality traits. Our school has been awarded by Ministry of Education for its devotion to education reform, promotion of reading, enhancement of health, cultivation of art and literature, engagement in parenting project, spatial integration for school characteristics, and development of professionalism in teachers. We are committed to cultivating our kids in Taian Elementary School into high-quality children who are simple, refined, healthy, happy, and self-confident.