Chess Club
Both Tuesday's and Thursday's chess clubs are meeting this week. It can be difficult to retrain our thinking about winning when in many games the winner is the one who takes the last piece or a certain piece. We have been working on understanding that to win in chess, you must first put your opponent's king in "check" and your opponent must not be able to get out of that check. Checkmate! We have been learning that there are three ways to get out of check. The first way is to move the king to a safe spot. The second way is to put one of your pieces in the way of the check. The third way is to take the piece that is putting you in check.
Making Movies in Your Mind as You Read
One strategy that we teach children to use when reading a story is to make a movie of that story in their mind as they are reading. They are to pretend that they are filming the movie. What are they picturing? What are the characters doing and what are they saying? It helps if they stop from time-to-time to replay the movie in their mind (summarize) to make sure that they were thinking while they were reading. If you are careful when doing this, it is amazing how many details from the story you can remember.
