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to ten children. Thus individualized
attention was maintained.
Today, the children range in ages
from 3 to
5
years. They are bright,
motivated, talkative and active.
A
Day at the Center
Monday through Friday, the children
spend seven hours a day at the Center.
Each child attends five "classes" a day,
covering three subjects - languagc,
reading and math problem-solving.
Breakfast, lunch, a snack, nap time
and free play fill the rest of the day.
Thursdays are often set aside for field
trips to the beach, a pumpkin farm, the
airport, a bread factory, a ranch, or just
a walk around the block to look at the
trees and collect leaves.
The result?
It would be difficult to find a group
of preschool children more genuinely
interested and excited in learning. The
children love to hear stories
oc
make up
their own. Sometimes they even play
"teacher."
They talk freely among themselves or
with the teachers. Although they can
speak the dialect of English common to
The
PLAI N TRUTH
their slum, they can also speak clear and
correct schoolroom English. After hear–
ing a visitor from Washington remark,
"Ain't this a fine morning," one child
told the guest, "That isn't the right way
to say that."
Last November, the "slowest" of the
five-year-olds had a sight-reading vocab–
ulary of twenty words. The four-year–
olds could identify weU over eight basic
colors and the basic geometric shapes.
They are now mastering such games as
picking out a red square from a blue
square and a red triangle.
Hope for the Slum Child
In short, the children are performing
tasks a year or more ahead of "normal"
children.
The Wisconsin researchers have care–
fully monitored the children's intel–
ligence progress with the standard
Stanford-Binet lntelligence Test, and
the children have absolutely astounded
their teachers.
Without their special schooling these
children would be starting to show
signs of mental retardation. They now
had an
average
l.
Q.
of
120.
As a
group, they were
in
the top
10%
of the
nation! Scores ranged from a low of
100
(which is the national average) to
a high of 135 (well within the "gifted"
category).
The children have also done ex–
tremely well on over
20
other tests of
learning and language. A team of
experts who analyzed their production
and comprehension of language rated
them as "superior."
According to Dr. Heber, "We have
seen a capacity for learoing on the part
of extremely young childreo, surpassing
anything which 1 would have previously
believed possible." It is difficult, he has
written, to conceive of the children as
ever falling back to the level of com–
parable slum children.
The children have demonstrated con–
clusively that progressive mental retar–
dation can be prevented.
If
these
children who had "every strike against
them" c2.n achieve this much, there is
reason to believe that other children can
LEARNING REWARD
-
John
sports o wristwotch, the reword
for correctly telling time.
2S