Chess Tournament

Thursday we got wind of a Chess Tournament.  The three big kids were really excited to go, and thankfully the parental schedule allowed us to support the event. The kids had a great time -- entirely too many electronic games were played but they really enjoy hanging out with classmates and it's a really good group of kids.  Thankfully, a few homework assignments got done and I did get them each to read for a few minutes during a mandatory electronic devise break. 

Tournaments make for a really, really long day.  If they are local and you are lucky, you're only gone about 9 hours.  The kids each play six games of chess with a variety of partners, and then there is an awards ceremony.  Our kids are still learning the mechanics of how to play, evident by their Win/Loss ratio. But for their second tournament ever, they kept their chin up and did well.  None of them had scores high enough to place, but Sam was able to help the K-3 team win 3rd place for our school.  He won 2 of his 6 games, something he was pretty excited about.  

The next tournament is in a couple of weeks.  I need to look into some chess tutorials for kids to help improve their game.

Rube Goldberg

For the last five weeks, Rebecca has been working on a science project with a partner. The task, build a Rube Goldberg machine.  Basically, combine 6 simple machines, using three of Newton's laws of motion, to perform a simple task ... move a soda can a meter, pop a balloon, knock over a row of dominoes, etc..  

The girls settled on removing a lid from an applesauce jar, and pouring the apple sauce into a bowl as their task, and put together a plan.  Once they had a plan, a design, a phone call to Grandpa Bob (who should get all the adult credit for insuring this project happened) was made.  Rebecca really wanted the jar lid to be sealed, but I was able to convince her that for this project an unsealed lid would be sufficient.  Maybe for their 8th grade Rube Goldberg project they will figure out how to remove a sealed lid from a canning jar.  

Alex, Anna and I went up with GR to see the projects in action.  So cool. So fun.  There were some really ingenious projects done with very, very simple materials.  I wish I had pictures and video of all of them, but there were so many!  The 5th graders presented their projects to 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 6th grade classes who came to see the three 5th grade classes machines in action.  

Here's Becca's project in action, followed by two classmates projects: