Figure 1.--One advatage of boarding is that there is lots more time for games with friends, and there are always friends about. Here the boys are enjoying a game of chess. Notice the tuck boxes the one boy is use as a chair.

The afternoon activities program varies greatly from school to school. The particular activity program at any school depends on facilities, school philosophy, staff skills and interests, children's interests and other factors. The range of different activities is quite long. Of course no one school has all of these activities, but many schools offer quite a number of them. There are both informal free-time activities as well as more striuctured supervised activities. Here there can be considerable overlap. Some activities we noted are: board games, carpentry, chess, choir, cooking, crafts (baskets, beads and much more), boating, dance, fencing, first aid, horseback riding, jigsaws, judo, music activities (many kinds), model making, model railroading, painting (different kinds), photography, stamp collecting, technology, and many other activities. There are also a variety of recreatinal sports beyond the major games, including: badminton, fencing, gymnastics, squash, and others. And besides the obvious activities there was the time honored institution of tuck. Here we can see tuck boxes (figure 1). A reader writes, "The image here brings back many memories. They are not trunks, which were somewhat larger and conveyed the boy's entire wardrobe for the term, but tuck boxes. They were originally for extra food for interim snacking, they tended to be a private corner in the boy's life where personal possessions were kept under lock and key. Prep schools tended to have very strict rules about actual tuck. Meanwhile food was (certainly at those ages) stored and distributed under the watchful eye of Matron."

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