Making all the right moves

Pleasant Hill Elementary chess club making all the right moves
Growing, improving by leaps, bounds

By Raina Hanna
Posted October 26, 2009 at midnight

When Pleasant Hill Elementary School opened five years ago, chess was something limited to introductory lessons within its gifted education classrooms.

Today, Pleasant Hill’s chess club is open to all its students as well as students from two nearby middle schools.

“We started the club four years ago because some kids were really interested in chess and others weren’t. I didn’t want to spend a lot of my class time doing chess when there were students that weren’t interested,” said Anne Cagle, fourth- and fifth-grade gifted teacher and the school’s chess club faculty sponsor.

Cagle decided what was needed was an after-school chess club. Cagle teamed up with Mike Stewart, a local chess master whose wife, Rosanne Stewart, teaches at DeSoto Central Middle School.

Stewart volunteered his time to coach students in strategies beyond those learned in class. However, the club was still made up of only gifted students.

“I knew for a while that there were kids at our school that were really good at chess that were not in Spotlight (gifted classes). I’d seen them at tournaments. Some of them were siblings of the students I teach. So we decided to open the club up to the rest of the students,” Cagle said.

Today, the Pleasant Hill chess club has close to 50 members and is divided into three groups. Two groups meet on Thursday afternoons divided by skill level.

The lower group is coached by second- and third-grade gifted teacher Carla Belk. The higher group is under Cagle’s direction, and the champion level players meet on Sunday afternoons coached by Stewart.

The Sunday group includes students who have graduated from Pleasant Hill and now attend DeSoto Central and Lewisburg middle schools.

Here is the full article.