Stories from a Sixty-Child School

Our entire sixth-grade Class A stepped onto the stage at the 114 Changhua County English Group Recitation Contest and walked off with an Excellence Award in Division D2. For a six-class rural school, every grade-six child performing in unison is already a feat — to do it in English, and to take a county-level prize, is one of those moments that quietly redraws what "small school" can mean.

The recitation team practiced through breaks and after-school sessions, coached by Yude's English teacher with support from resident foreign teacher Amanda Kalinowski. Their English carried more than vocabulary — it carried a small, deliberate, collective pride.

At the 114 Changhua County Magistrate Cup Kendo Championship, Yude's young swordsmen and swordswomen brought home a clean run of first, second, and third place finishes across the lower-grade and middle-grade individual basic categories. Kendo is one of Yude's quietly distinctive co-curricular threads — discipline, posture, the long bow before a match.

For a school with only six classrooms, fielding multiple medalists in a single county-level event is the kind of result that reminds the community: small does not mean modest.

In the township's annual Creative Lantern Painting Contest, Yude students earned honorable mentions and final-round selections in both the lower-middle and middle-upper grade divisions. The lantern is one of Erlin's quiet civic traditions — paint your village onto paper, hold it up to the light, and walk it through the streets at festival time.

Each year, Yude's art-class curriculum (Soaring Arts) feeds directly into this contest. Children paint their own version of Outer Bamboo: red-brick gates, buckwheat blossoms, mobile-library trucks, and the rainbow arch above our schoolyard entrance.

Two of our fifth-graders — Hong Hsuan-jou and Yin Yi-chen — took home an Excellence Award in the upper-elementary Taiwanese-language division of the National Mother-Tongue Picture-Book Contest. The two of them wrote and illustrated the entire book themselves, in Taiwanese.

"Mother tongue" lands differently in a village school. The language Yude children grow up hearing from their grandparents is the same language they're now learning to write down and illustrate — turning the rhythms of home into something they can hand to someone else.

Chen Yi-yun, a fourth-grade student in Class A, has been published twice on Page 8 of the Mandarin Daily News — on January 23 and February 26 of 2026. The Mandarin Daily News is, for many Taiwanese children, the very first newspaper they learn to read; being published in it is also a quiet rite of passage for young writers.

Yi-yun's submissions came directly out of "Yude Reading Time" (育德愛閱), our daily reading curriculum. A child who reads carefully, the saying goes, eventually starts to write.

Fifth-grader Yin Yi-chen earned a Merit Award, and second-grader Yen Ya-ju earned an Honorable Mention, at the Anti-Drug & Internet-Addiction Awareness Poster Contest. Both posters started life in our regular art class and grew into something public — a private painting becomes a piece of community education.

Chen Po-han, a third-grade student in Class A, took an Honorable Mention in the 114 Changhua County Student Art Competition — Painting Division, A2 Middle-Grade Elementary category. Po-han's award is the latest in a steady string of county-level recognitions for Yude's art programme.

Tsai Chia-en, a fifth-grader in Class A, won an Excellence Award in the 114 Changhua County Language Arts Competition — Mandarin Recitation, Elementary Group, Area 4 Preliminary. From "Yude Reading Time" on the page to standing in front of judges with a clear, steady voice — recitation is the bridge that many of our young readers cross.