Newsletter #8, January 17, 2017
Post date: Jan 18, 2017 4:32:02 AM
Dear Prairie Chess Families,
Iowa Elementary Team Championship Results
Congratulations to our Prairie Creek Students who competed in the Iowa K-6 Chess Championship last Saturday. Our team of six players made the trip and were rewarded with a third place finish. This equals our best performance in ten years of competing in this event and improves upon our fourth place performance last year.
Left to right: Elliott Bourgous, Mason Porter, Angell Ortega, Ben Kleiman, Audrey Sellon, Connor Groff, and Jim Hodina
T-Shirt Order
Parrish Copeland, one of our many amazing Prairie Chess Club Parents, has put together a T-Shirt design for our chess club. It is fabulous and quite different from our past chess club designs. Both Youth and Adult sizes are available. All shirts are $6.25 with the exception of 2XL and 3XL, which are $7.25 and $8.25 respectively.
To place your t-shirt order, go to our website at www.chessiniowa.org/prairiechessclub You may place your order and pay through the PayPal / Credit Card option or you may complete the online form and send a check to chess club or by mail to me at 3411 Blue Pointe Ct. SW, Cedar Rapids, IA 52404
Today's Chess Club Lesson
For Prairie Creek and Point students, we discussed the value of a "passed pawn." A passed pawn is a pawn that has no other pawns blocking its path to the bank rank and promoting to a queen. I demonstrated this with a game that I had actually played recently. We then had some puzzle handout to work on with the students.
For the Elementary Students, we returned to the computer lab and logged into our ChessKid.com accounts. A few students were not with us last week and so they got set up as well. We used the “computer workout” learning tool (https://www.chesskid.com/computer/) to practice how to checkmate. Then we learned how to challenge other Prairie Chess Club members online. Our Prairie Chess Kids have an online club on ChessKid.com at https://www.chesskid.com/clubhome/prairie-chess-club. I encouraged our students to use their accounts this month to complete more computer workouts and puzzles. Our chess club tracks student achievement on our leaderboard at https://www.chesskid.com/groups/leaderboard.html?id=10837. We will recognize students on Monday who have made progress on these two learning exercises.
Otherwise, things seem to be continuing to go well. We are still fine on snacks for a few more weeks. Elementary students continue to do well walking from the bus loading area to Creek. As always, please let me know if you have questions.
