'But FunMasterMike Says': How ChessKid Helps Homeschooling Communities
ChessKid is supporting 100 schools in North Carolina with free ChessKid Gold accounts for all their students, but did you know that ChessKid is also great for homeschooling?In this special guest blog post, chess dad Andrew Votipka shares how ChessKid helped with his homeschooled kids' education, and how ChessKid has impacted the homeschooling community in his local area.
Just prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, our local library in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, had received several donated chess boards. The staff had planned to begin a chess club, but that was cut short. My kids already had an interest in chess, having learned to set up the board and move the pieces, so they were disappointed when the club never met.
We attempted to get better by using books but found them overwhelming. And I didn’t trust the massive online chess sites enough to give my kids unfettered access, so we mostly just played each other.
A friend of ours was also getting into chess with his son and began excitedly pitching us on a website, ChessKid.com, that they’d started using. He said he could form a group on the site that we could all join so our kids could play each other remotely in a safe environment. But we knew we needed a way to get more members.
So in November of 2022, we hosted a chess tournament in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, at a local venue (conveniently owned by my brother). Thirty players from the towns of Greenville, Wilson, Rocky Mount, Nashville, and Spring Hope, ranging in age from 5 to 16, signed up to compete in the round-robin style tournament. It was such a fun experience! Afterward I received comments from every player and parent that they wanted this to become a regular thing. So we started a chess club and started getting parents to sign up their kids on ChessKid and join our group.
Fast-forward to February 2023. We now have 17 active members in the Eastern NC Chess Club on ChessKid, and almost 20 kids coming to our monthly in-person meetups. Pretty much everyone in the group has an ongoing slow match with everyone else on ChessKid. Our favorite feature of the group site is the ease of setting up tournaments. We hosted our first over the Christmas break and have tried to have one planned every month in addition to our in-person meetings.
“Fun Master Mike says three developed minor pieces are worth one lost pawn,” I was taught at our last meeting. Collectively our club has gotten so into it that one of the other dads spray painted his driveway into a massive outdoor board and bought giant chess pieces for the kids (and adults) to use.
We homeschool, as do several of the families in our group, and ChessKid has become a part of my kids' curriculum. We started with the lesson plans they make available, but the kids have become so familiar with the site that they mostly guide their own learning (and since they’re constantly teaching me new theory and crushing me in matches, I’m assuming their method is working).
My oldest two do puzzles, watch the lessons, do the vision exercises, compete in the online tournaments, and keep up with anything Fun Master Mike puts out. They even choose FMM videos over Dude Perfect when given the option. My daughter has learned how to move the pieces by watching the hilarious videos ChessKid puts out. She beat a neighborhood boy in a game the other day and you’d have thought she’d won the Super Bowl.
One of the reasons we decided to homeschool was so that our kids could do deep dives into whatever they become obsessed with. And right now that’s chess, in no small part due to ChessKid. Getting to log on and play on ChessKid is also the single greatest incentive you can offer a child to get their math and reading lessons done! In this particular instance, chess really is making my kids smarter. The two boys recently competed in the North Carolinians for Home Education mid-winter chess tournament and placed 3rd and 5th in the junior division. And that was against kids with Rubik's cubes!
We learned at the event that basically every other kid there was also using ChessKid to train. Our hope this May is to bring a contingency of Eastern NC kids to the next NCHE tournament and fill the podium!
Looking for additional resources? Check out these recommended chess activities for kids and tips on how to use ChessKid for homeschooling.