Chess Makes the Grade

Click on the chess piece to go to the Class Club Descriptions

Why would you want to register your child for our upcoming after-school Chess Class?  Read the following article to get a sense of the proven short-term and long-term benefits that playing chess provides to children...AND wouldn't it be fun to be able to play this old fashioned board game with your kids???

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Schools that encourage chess are reacting to studies like that of New York City-based educational psychologist Stuart Margulies, Ph.D., who in 1996 found that elementary school students in Los Angeles and New York who played chess scored approximately 10 percentage points higher on reading tests than their peers who didn't play. James M. Liptrap, a teacher and chess sponsor at Klein High School in Spring, TX, conducted a similar study in 1997. He found that fifth-graders who played chess scored 4.3 points higher on state reading assessments and 6.4 points higher on math tests than their non-chess-playing peers.

Further proof comes from the doctoral dissertation of Robert Ferguson, executive director of the American Chess School in Bradford, PA. He studied junior-high students, each of whom was enrolled in an activity -- either working with computers, playing chess, taking a creative writing workshop, or playing Dungeons and Dragons -- that was designed to develop critical and creative thinking skills. By the time the students had spent about 60 hours on their chosen activities, the chess players were well ahead of the others in several psychological tests, scoring almost 13 percentage points higher in critical thinking and 35 percentage points higher in creative thinking.

Experts attribute chess players' higher scores to the rigorous workout chess gives the brain:  chess improves a child's visual memory, attention span, and spatial-reasoning ability. And because it requires players to make a series of decisions, each move helps kids learn to plan ahead, evaluate alternatives, and use logic to make sound choices.

Excerpted from Parents Magazine, Article by Beth Weinhouse

The first After-School class of the year has now been added!

Learn Guitar and Make the World a Better Place

Taught by Joey Howell & Debbit Hoodiman

For students in Grades 4 - 6

Click on Joey's Picture for more information & to register

We've increased the cost of our programs by about 3% to account for the increased costs involved in operating them, and inflation. 

This increase mirrors the most recent annual Consumer Price Index increase.