We received nine entries to our t-shirt design contest last Friday. Our parent judges are currently reviewing them all and we plan to choose a winner at this Friday’s club meeting. As soon as we have a winner, we will begin working with our shirt vendor to get the design touched up and finalize the shirt order. We hope to have the shirts finished and passed out by November.
The Spicewood Elementary Chess Club is having a party at the Spicewood Elementary school on Saturday November 2nd from 10:00 to 2:00pm. The event is for 4 hours with pizza arriving around noon. We know Saturday’s are a busy day with lots of sports and other activities, so this event is designed for you to come and go as you please. Swing by for only 30 minutes or stay the whole time.
We will be playing Chess and having fun with our friends. We will have coaches available to work with the students. This is the week before the Casis Elementary Scholastic Chess tournament, so we will be helping the kids prepare for the tournament as well as have fun with our special chess sets including our light up chess boards, our 4 player chess sets, our Musketeer variant chess pieces (elephant, unicorn, dragon, leopard, etc)
We have also invited some of our friends from other local elementary Chess clubs as well as local chess teachers and experts.
The club will be providing Pizza and we ask parents to signup to bring other items needed for the party such as drinks, plates, utensils, etc. This is also a potluck, so we encourage parents to bring cookies, snacks, etc. There is a signup sheet for Parents to RSVP and let us know what item/items you can volunteer to bring. Please remember no food containing nuts!
Registration closed on September 27th for Chess club. We will re-open registration for two weeks starting in January 6th for any additional students who want to join.
We have 109 students in our club this year. Half of those students are in Kindergarten or 1st grade, so we have many beginners this year. Here are some statistics:
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Here is a nice animated video that talks about the origins and history of Chess. We recommend all students watch this and it is only five minutes long.
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We had 14 students from Spicewood Elementary participate in the Meridian Scholastic Chess tournament on September 14th, 2019. The tournament consisted of 5 rounds of games each worth 1 point. In total, our kids scored a total of 35 out of a possible 70 points. (50%)
This tournament kind of snuck up on us as we did not do a great job of promoting it in the weeks leading up to it. We will do a better job for the next tournament at Casis Elementary.
We got FIRST place in the K-1 under 400 section with 2 students getting a total score of 8 points!. Congratulations to Yashas Veerapaneni for winning all 5 of his games and getting 1st place in the section (Trophy). Benjamin Yu came in 6th with 3 wins (Medal). This two person team received the 1st place trophy at the awards ceremony and you can see it at our next club meeting.
We got FOURTH place in the K-3 under 700 section with 3 students gaining a total score of 5 points. (Devin Liu, Julian Joseph and Tiffany Teoh)
We got THIRD place in the K-5 under 1000 section with 2 students gaining a total score of 8 points. Joyce Song came in 3rd place with 4 wins and Gavin Wang came in 5th place with 4 wins each getting a trophy!
For the individual awards:
We had three students receive trophies for 4 or more points in their sections: Yashas Veerapaneni, Joyce Song and Gavin Wang.
We had 1 student receive a medal for scoring between 3.0 and 3.5 points in their sections: Benjamin Yu.
Congratulations to all of our students who competed at this year’s Meridian chess tournament. Each student will get $5 chess bucks for their participation.
We also note that Canyon Vista Middle school got first place in the K-12 Any rating section. We were happy to see many Spicewood Elementary chess club alumni in the group that won!
At today’s club meeting, coach Chris announced a design contest for the students to come up with this year’s t-shirt design. We wanted to pass out a flyer that outlined this contest, but in the hectic ending of our meeting, we forgot to hand it out. No worries though as we can post it right here for you to read.
We have a two week hiatus while the Book fair goes on in the library and when we return on October 4th, all t-shirt designs are due. From all of the submissions, the coaches will pick a winner. That winner will not only get $5 Chess bucks, but will also have their name printed next to their design on every shirt!
We have some rules to follow, so please read through them on the contest rules page.
Here are some images of the past 10 years of T-shirt designs to use as inspiration.
Our third meeting of the year went smoothly as the Pawns continued lessons with James on the basics of controlling the center while Chris reviewed how Forks are a powerful tactic to use in the middlegame with the Knights, Rooks and Kings. A video from Chesskid.com was shown that outlined the fork principles and you can watch it here:
Parents are in the process of completing registration. We had a number of fees and forms turned in. If you haven’t finished the six registration steps yet, please do so as the deadline for completion is September 27th. We have a few students who are still attending our club to see if they want to continue on as members, so remember to be helpful to anyone who is new.
We will be testing students next week to see if they are ready to move up in Skill groups, so look forward to that next week.
The first scholastic tournament of the year is happening NEXT WEEKEND, September 14th. Us coaches highly encourage everyone to attend at least one tournament this year. You can find details on how to register at this link: Meridian School Tournament.
The second scholastic tournament of the year will be held at one of our favorite locations, Casis Elementary on November 9th. You can register for that tournament here: Casis Elementary Tournament. (It is my favorite location because there is a Starbucks DIRECTLY ACROSS THE STREET!!!)
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Registration for the 2019-2020 school year opened on August 12th. Please click on the About section above and then click on the Registration link. That page gives all the details on the registration process and a link to the Registration Form. You can also click here to go directly to that page.
Club registration will end on September 27th. After this date, we will no longer accept any new students until the second semester begins in January 2020.
For parents and students that are thinking about joining our club, you can attend our first few club meetings without committing to join. Come to our meetings and see how you like it. We ask that you make your final decision to join by our registration deadline of September 27th.
We held our last Chess store event as well as our last Chess club meeting today. 71 students participated, bring all their collected Chess bucks to buy amazing items like Rubik’s cubes, Pokemon cards, tshirts, toys, games and a plethora of plastic baubles. Altogether we collected $1,317 Chess bucks. That means the average student spend ~$19 chess bucks each.
With our principal, Mrs. Teyan Page’s help, we all thanked Mrs. Reeb for being our club sponsor for the last ten years. She decided to step down as our sponsor for next year and we thanked her with a large card that all the students signed as well as a nice gift card for her to use.
Next year, our club sponsor will be our TAG teacher, Marla Mikolay.
We had a very successful year and thank all our parents, volunteers and teachers for their support.
