A Year In The Robbinsdale Spanish Immersion Chess Club

A lot happened in one year at the Robbinsdale Spanish Immersion chess club.

Let’s take a look at how we have been using ChessKid as part of a community-oriented approach to teach and appreciate scholastic chess.

Every week at the Robbinsdale Spanish Immersion chess club, we use ChessKid videos as the basis for our instruction by playing lessons in all of our groups (beginners to advanced) before allowing the kids to play games and practice what they had been shown.

We encourage the kids to play and practice at home by issuing all 180 children gold memberships to ChessKid and by having monthly contests for kids who did the most puzzles in a month and most fast games for the month.

We also encouraged our kids to get involved with our local scholastic chess tournaments by throwing our own in-house chess tournament where 83 kids participated. For about 20 of the children it was the first time they participated in a tournament of any kind.

We invited a new Minnesota resident, GM Wesley So, to attend our tournament, and he graciously showed up to give trophies to our winners and take pictures and sign autographs for all the children who wanted them!

We were then rewarded at our state tournament by having our K-3 team take fourth out of 54 teams and our K-6 team take fifth out of 58 teams.

The picture in front of the horse was in Nashville at Andrew Jackson's Hermitage.

After that we took our first team to the National Elementary Chess Tournament in Nashville where our K-3 unrated team took second place, and three out of four kids won individual trophies, including one child who was co-champion of the K-3 unrated section (second after tie-breakers).

All in all it was a great year and most important, we had lots of fun!