The Discovery Room is a mental health oriented primary school intervention for children with learning and behavioral difficulties in the classroom which has been steadily modified over a four-year period through accommodation to real-life needs of an inner city school. In the Discovery Room, a special teacher works with children singly or in pairs for two half-hour sessions a week in a special room. Improvement in academic and social functioning is fostered by strengthening the child's self-image through work with varied materials and imaginative play in the context of a close, supportive relationship between the Discovery Room teacher and the child, and positive communication with parents and classroom teacher. The Discovery Room was initiated by university staff for often overlooked children who were "turned off" to school learning although they were not hard to "manage" in the classroom. Through utilizing some of its unanticipated consequences, the intervention has evolved in scope to include the classroom as a whole. The next phase calls for a core group of classroom teachers to be trained in the Discovery Room approach so that they can take part in constructing a classroom model. Thus the attempt will be made to move from secondary to primary intervention. (Author)