One afternoon each week, the Games Club meets, and there the children learn games of intellectual skill. Chess and checkers are the favorites. It is believed that education for leisure time is a special responsibility of those who teach highly intelligent children. The most intelligent tend to become "isolates," through not finding in the ordinary course of life recreations congenial both to themselves and to contemporaries. A game like chess or checkers can be shared with pleasure, irrespective of age, by any two people who have a sufficient "mental nearness." Hence they help a very gifted child to "find company" and "enjoy himself" in all age groups--a very important factor in the social development of such a child. The interest in these games is kept within bounds by the restriction to one hour a week and to those pupils who are up to date in their school work. Possibly more time should be allowed for the Games Club as pupils grow older.
Having followed our description of the enriched curriculum to this point, readers who have no direct experience in the education of children of the caliber being considered may begin to be anxious for the welfare of "reading, writing, and arithmetic." Let them be reassured. Mornings are devoted to the established curriculum of the elementary school, the pupils working by "contracts." Achievement tests are given at regular intervals to determine conventional grade status in the various "subjects." In June, 1937, our pupils showed the "educational age" of pupils at the middle of the seventh grade of the elementary schools as measured by Stanford Achievement Tests. They were then nine years six months old, on the median. The "regular" grade status for them would have been the middle of the fourth grade. The most intelligent tenth of the pupils were already "through the ceiling" of Stanford Achievement and of other standard achievement tests in June, 1937.
At this point, it should be mentioned that our pupils do not have and never have had homework assigned to them.
The intellectual interest and capacity of young children who test from 160 to 200 IQ is incredible to those who have had no experience with the teaching of such children. We have in our classes about a dozen of such extreme deviates. They are truly _original_ thinkers and doers of their generation. A book could be made of the incidents constantly occurring which denote the qualities of their minds. It is these children who suffer most from ennui in the ordinary situation.