Songsin Kindergarten in Sadong District in the capital city of Pyongyang for children of ordinary working people was built along with Songhwa Street which was inaugurated in April last year.

Covering a total floor space of over 3 300㎡, it consists of scores of education rooms, bedrooms, a general playroom, a nature study room and a wading pool.

Shoots and buds

It is a little more than a year since the kindergarten opened, but it becomes a cradle of talented children.

Pak Yon Hyang, 7, who was admitted to a primary school this year, won the first place in the solo dance event of the national art festival of kindergartners last year. When her parents sent their shy daughter to the kindergarten, they had never thought that she would do dance.

Headmistress Hong Hyang Suk paid close attention to the characters, mentalities, aptitudes and intellectual development of children. In the course of this, she discovered that Yon Hyang had a faculty of expressing her feelings with delicate movements.

The girl was included in the dance group. Her skillful movements of folk dances Bell Dance and Bamboo-hat Dance struck the participants and jury in the art festival with admiration.

The kindergarten has put effort into the intellectual and artistic education of children, with the result that Pak Jin Song, Kim Hyo Hyon and Choe Ye Un, all six years old, entered the rankings in the national contest of talented kindergarteners.

Teacher Kim Yong Hui said: The days at kindergarten can be likened to the budding period of a tree. Finding out the buds of talents and cultivating them into full bloom is the bounden duty of educators.

We will become scientists

The kindergarten has triplets Sin Ju Gwang, Sin Ju Myong and Sin Ju Song, who are five years old.

They are the 484th boy triplets born at the Pyongyang Maternity Hospital.

Their teacher Kim Un Byol said they are unusually clever and have good presentation skills, which are attributable to their unique nutritive conditions.

The boys are taller than others of the same age and their height surpasses the standard one of their age.

According to their mother Ju Hyang, 29, they weighed 1.88kg, 2.04kg and 1.67kg respectively. At the maternity hospital their nutritive conditions got better with each passing day. They were sent from the hospital to the Pyongyang Baby Home, in which a doctor and three nurses took charge of their health all the time. During the days the state provided them with many medicines, foods and tonics. Last year their family moved into a new house in Songhwa Street.

When their teacher asked them at a class what they would be in the future, they replied that they would become scientists like their father.

Hong Hyang Suk said: Whenever I see the triplets and other children growing up healthily in the kindergarten under the care of the Party and the state, I feel pride in working as an educator who trains the future pillars of the country.