Boost 2 - Term 3 Week 3

After the success of the recent chess tournament, we are sticking with the chess theme and making our own chess sets.  The boys are all very excited about this and there was lots of noise and chatter when deciding which theme they would go with.  Once they decided on a theme we talked about the characteristics of each chess piece.  For example the Queen is the most powerful piece on the board.  She can move fast from one end of the board to the other and she is tall, so when we choose a character for our Queen piece, they need to have the same characteristics as the original piece.  There is a lot of critical thinking going into justifying the reasons for their choices and the boys are learning that they can't just choose any old character, it has to be relevant to the chess piece characteristics.  So far we have a dinosaur set (herbivores against carnivores), a Star Wars set (classic black versus white), a transformers set (autobots against deceptions) and a minecraft set (monsters versus players). 

Today we started on our chess boards - the boys learned how to change the board around to ensure that they kept their lines nice and neat.  We also started making a prototype of a chess piece each to check for correct sizing on the board.  We will continue with the boards next session and begin modelling our pieces as well.