Chess Meet

Thats right, This week's club meet was indeed 'Chess Meet'. A bunch of us teamed up and learnt/played chess. Mom gave the lessons then and there - we talked about ranks, files, moves of the Rook, Queen's place, right way to set the board, etc.
After everyone seemed to be upto speed, we played with just Pawns & Rooks to practice the moves of the Rook - whoever captures all of the opponent pawns using his Rook is the winner. Both teams won once out of 2 games. It is just an easy exercise for beginners to master one piece at a time.
And before winding up the session, I had to give a speech on what we did Today. Mom insists on that!
All in all, I liked Today's session, it was excellent!

Dino Bank - Money & Time

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Mom coined a new game for this week's club meet. It combines both money and time telling into one fun game - Dino Bank.
Make a pretty gameboard as shown above - draw anything with a game path in a file folder - we used the dinosaur's spikes as the game path. You need some index cards with time written in digital format on one side, an analog clock to set the time, some real coins, playing pieces.
Players take turns and draw the index cards. The player reads the digital time on the card and should set the clock in the analog learning clock. The next player has to guess the time. If they both get it right, they both get a penny each. If one loses, the other gets twice the money (say 2 pennies in this case). Then they put their coins and place their play piece on top of it in the gameboard. When a player collects 5 pennies, he can convert that into a nickel in the dino bank (your gameboard) and place the nickel on the second space (dino spike) and place his piece on top or it. From this point, he gets 1 or 2 nickels for every correct time set/guess until he converts the nickels into a dime and moves to the next spike. Play ends when anyone converts their coins into a dollar in the dino bank!

This game simultaneously teaches/revises money identification, money manipulation, reading digital time, setting the analog clock to a time, reading the analog clock..oh the possibilities!

We enjoyed this game. We practiced time telling to half hour this week and we all made it to the finish line one by one. Mom said everyone is a winner.

US States Intro & Public speaking

Part 2 of our club meet is all about US States. We laid out the us map and used index cards with shapes of the states or questions about the states. Players took turns to answer the questions. Whoever gets it right has to spell that state aloud and move that many letters in the state name. This served as a general knowledge session as well as a spelling test on US States. :)

And this week mom introduced another element to the class: The last 5 mins of the club session, We have to give each a speech comprehending what we played in the class and what we learnt, like what is the rule for each game etc. We got so excited about the speech part - we really thought we could all deliver a great speech after being inspired by Obama's inaguaration and all - but ooh..it is not as easy as it sounds! We tried our bet though. Since every week we would deliver a speech about the class and the other moms would be our audiences, mom thinks we would get the hang of it in the coming sessions. Hey thats the whole point of adding this element.

Club Meet

This week in our club mom conducted a science boardgame - We have to draw question cards on body parts and answer them. Since we are all still learning, we made it a group game rather than a contest and guessed the answers together. Some of the topics being reflex, saliva, kidney, bladder, bones, marrow.. Mom might do a mini quiz on this next week to see if we retained any of those info. :) Then we played a game to improve our focus - ie when anyone makes a 4 of a kind card, he has to grab a toy in front of him - the last one or least attentive player will get zero points and at the end of certain rounds, the highest scorer is the winner. Finally we went over count by 5s as a prelude to practice time to half hours.

Time telling game

This week, we used our custom clocks that we made last week to practice time telling. Mom put some number tiles in a tray and we have to take turns to draw a number (1 to 12). The player has to then set his clock to that time (to the hour). The rest of the players have to guess the time. The player who set the clock moves his pawn that many hours and the players who guessed the time correctly get to move one space ahead. The first one to reach the finish line is the winner. If a player lands on another player, the latter has to start all over again.

Grammar Game

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We played a grammar game to revise basics - We used a custom gameboard at home. You can use an existing one or make your own. Players take turn to draw a word from a pool of word tiles and must tell whether the word is a noun / verb / adjective / adverb. If the answer is correct, he/she can move the pawn to that many letters in the word. The first one to reach the finish line first is the winner. Mom put some twist to the rules so if a player lands on another, the later can be chased to the start. And if the number of letters in the word is greater than the number of spaces to the finish, he has to move back the extra spaces. It was hilarious when we all lined up at the end moving back and forth. It is a 2 in 1 game where we do a bit of grammar and a bit of spelling!