Spicewood Elementary Chess Club
Central Texas Chess club
Our judges have voted and the winning design goes to 5th grader Leonardo Fernandez. His design has two cats or panthers playing Chess at a table with one standing up. Around it, text says “The Best Never Rest”
Congratulations to Leonardo who wins a $5 chess buck. And thank you to all the students who entered the contest this year. The design will be sent to our tshirt printing company for their graphic artist to clean up. We hope to have tshirts in November for everyone to wear and enjoy.
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!
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.
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.
Back in May 2016, a parent, Patrick Ivey, donated a beautiful marble chess set to the chess club. It was too nice for everyday use, so we only brought it out on special occasions. This meant that it sat on a shelf most of the time.
Colleen Murphy, mom of club member Jameson Murphy-Hall, saw the set at the end of last school year and thought it would make a great woodworking project for her husband McLain Hall. She took the marble chess board home over the summer and McLain worked his magic to create a table to house the board.
Well, two weeks ago, the Chess table was completed and Colleen presented it to the Chess club. It is amazing and a great example of fine woodworkmanship. The table design was based off the existing chess table we have in the library. Similar height, etc. It has a built in drawer to house the marble chess pieces when not in use.
McLain used 3/4 inch pine. The legs were made by gluing multiple boards together to get the right thickness. He used a gel stain for the finish and 3 coats of polyurethane as a surface protectant.
We all thank Colleen, McLain and Jameson for donating their time and work to make this nice table for our club. We hope all of our students get a chance to play on this board over the course of the year.
Congratulations to Nico McMullen for a first place finish at the annual Wooldridge Square outdoor tournament held last Sunday Nov. 4th in downtown Austin. The weather was perfect and so was Nico’s chess game. He won all 4 games to win a trophy and capture first place in the K-6 section. Congratulations also goes to Aiden Chrisman for participating in this tournament and helping represent Spicewood Elementary.
Nico then traveled down to San Antonio on November 10th to play in the Bach & Peace Tournament. He won 4 games and drew one which put him in first place for the K-12 U900 section. Congratulations! He is on a roll.
Thank you for doing a great job representing Spicewood.
We had 29 students from Spicewood Elementary participate in the Meridian Scholastic Chess tournament on September 29th, 2018. The tournament consisted of 5 rounds of games each worth 1 point. In total, our kids scored a total of 70 out of a possible 145 points. (48%)
This year we have a large number of Pawns and Knights skill groups and they showed up at this tournament and really did a great job representing the K-1 and K-3 sections.
We got FIRST place in the K-1 under 400 section with 5 students getting a total score of 10.5 points. The team received a tall trophy at the awards ceremony and you can see it in the Spicewood Elementary library this week.
We got SECOND place in the K-3 New section with 7 students gaining a total score of 10 points. This team also received a team trophy which is in the library.
We got THIRD place in the K-3 under 400 section with 3 students gaining a total score of 7.5 points. This team also received a team trophy which is in the library.
We got SECOND place in the K-5 under 800 section with 4 students gaining a total score of 13.5 points. This team also received a team trophy which is in the library.
We also came in NINTH place in the K-12 Any section which includes mostly middle and high school students. Sean Teoh won 3 out of 5 games against a lot of tough opponents.
For the individual awards:
We had two students receive trophies for 4 or more points in their sections: Alexander Ho and Gavin Wang.
We had 8 students receive medals for scoring between 3.0 and 4.0 points in their sections: Sean Teoh, Gavin Gu, Isaac Belyi, Isaac Zhang, Julian Joseph, Joyce Song, Jeremy Yang and Reett Aulakh
Congratulations to all of our students who competed at this year’s Meridian chess tournament. Each student received $5 chess bucks for their participation. We had many first time tournament students this year and they all did a great job representing Spicewood Elementary.
The tournament itself was very nice as it was not as crowded as other tournaments have been in the past. Plenty of room to mingle with others, areas outside to play, etc. The tournament coordinators did an excellent job and we look forward to more tournaments later this year and next.
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