Chess club

One of the best e-mails I've received this school year was the one asking me if I'd be interested in running a chess club.

The letter came from S.J., a homeschooler who lives in Somerset County and whose daughter organized and taught an animal science class that Oldest Daughter attended last year. S. has a son a little younger than Oldest Daughter who also enjoys chess, and S. felt that hosting a chess club in her house would be a great way for him to get the practice and instruction it would take to improve his game.

It was an offer I couldn't refuse. I'd been looking into running a chess club at the local library, but aside from making arrangements with the library staff to reserve a room, I also would have to make arrangements for someone to watch Youngest Daughter, since it's difficult to provide chess instruction while minding a 2-year-old. With the offer S. was making, I not only would have a place for the club, I had an offer to watch Youngest Daughter while the club met.

Short of the hosting invitation coming from Winona Ryder herself, does it get any better than that?

Chess is widely regarded as conferring social and academic benefits upon children who play it regularly. Players are required to treat one another and the game itself with respect, to avoid disruptive behavior or even unncessary discussion, and instead to focus on the mental rigors of the game itself.

Played on an eight-by-eight square board with two armies of sixteen pieces each, the game requires a number of mental skills. Foremost among these are concentration and forethought. Players not only have to decide what their next move will be, they have to anticipate what their opponent's next move will be, at least one move in advance but better yet three or four.

New players often think it is enough to threaten an opponent's piece, but the truth is that to be effective, they must threaten two or more pieces simultaneously. When their own pieces are threatened, they have to weigh the value of each move, judging the values of their respective pieces, and also consider whether there are any counteroffensives that will put their opponent on the defensive, and thus saving their own pieces.

Research has shown that children who play chess show a statistically significant advantage over children who don't play chess, not only in math and science, but in terms of their overall psychocognitive development. This is all a growing process, one that takes place as children play chess over a prolonged period. In other words, in addition to all its other benefits, chess helps children to develop the satisfaction and self-esteem that come from sticking with someothing for the long haul.

I also can say that there is a tremendous measure of personal satisfaction once you reach the point that you can beat your father at chess over three consecutive nights. (Not to mention a corresponding level of humility when your daughter starts trouncing you,)

The chess club has been running for a month now, and I can honestly say that everyone who has come has been enjoying themselves. If anyone else wants to join us, we have room for about eight more players.

The club meets in Franklin Township, Somerset County, at 11 a.m. the first and third Fridays of each month. Generally speaking, children should be between 10 and 14 years old and should have their own chess sets. The main focus of the club is on playing the game, but inexperienced players will have the chance to learn the rules, and more experienced players will get to work on strategy.

Any questions, including requests for specifics on where to meet, please contact me.

Tour de Monarchs

The best school projects are always the ones that the students themselves initiate.

Oldest Daughter has for a couple years now evinced an ongoing fascination with England and the English way of doing things. This may have its origins in her discovery of her father's collection of 30-year-old Dr. Who novels from when he was her age. Alternately, it may have grown from her frequent voyages to Middle Earth courtesy of Professor Tolkien and "The Lord of the Rings." It's also possible it's just One of Those Things.

Regardless, I know a good thing when I see one. This past Christmas, I gave her a copy of "The Plantagenets: The Kings that Made Britain" as her own, to read.

Read it she has. In less than a month, she has read about kings from Henry II down through Henry V, and in that remarkable way that children have, she has kept track not only of major events like the Peasants Revolt and the Black Death, but has kept track of whose son was whose, which kings were good, and which were bad.

And that's all good, but like every other homeschooling parent, I want to make sure that she's not only reading, she's learning; and like every other homeschooling parent, I want her passion for learning in one area to fuel a passion for learning in other areas. Reading opens doorways to the past, but if those doors, once opened, don't also lead to adjoining chambers of music, art and even computer skills, I soon would feel that an opportunity had been missed.

So today, as we took a walk outside to get some fresh air and stretch our legs, we talked about what she can produce for her homeschooling portfolio, from this journey through English history.

The project:

• A series of index cards, one for each ruler of England, beginning with Henry II. Each card will include an original rendering either of the king, his chivalric crest, or an inhabited initial for his name; plus the name of the king, the years he reigned, and the two or three most remarkable thing about his reign.
• When the index cards are finished, Oldest Daughter will scan her images, and use them to create a PowerPoint that presentation with the pertinent information on the cards.
• Oldest Daughter also will create a video based on the PowerPoint presentation, accompanied by a rendition of  the British patriotic hymn "Jerusalem." For bonus points, she will add to the soundtrack the question "Did somebody say 'mattress' to Mr. Lambert?" followed by the rejoinder "Twice!"

Quite apart from the project, we're continuing to read plays and other literature about these kings. Oldest Daughter earlier this year read T.S. Elliot's "Murder in the Cathedral," and I'm hoping we can find some decent video adaptations of the appropriate Shakespeare plays detailing the Wars of the Roses, beginning with "Richard II" and ending with "Richard III."

So, if all goes according to plan, at the end of this course of study on the kings of England, she not only will have studied her history, she'll have exercised her art skills, learned and performed some music, and put her computer skills to use.

And perhaps best of all, she'll have done so with a nod to Monty Python.

Tabletop chemistry

I have a chemistry project running on my kitchen table that, despite their affectations of disinterest, is starting to intrigue my older two girls.

A couple months ago, I bought two rubber stoppers, some brewer's yeast, and two plastic airlocks at a local homebrewing store, and set about transmuting grape juice to wine, a noble alchemy celebrated by Spike Your Juice. At the time, the girls weren't very interested. The oldest daughter in particular was put off that I was, as near as she could tell, ruining a perfectly good bottle of Northland Cran-Grape juice by turning it into alcohol.

This time around, I have two bottles on the table: Welch's grape juice, and a store brand apple cider. This time, the girls are watching what's going on, and they're asking questions.

1. Why are the drinks bubbling?
2. Why did the apple juice start to foam first, but the grape juice foam more?
3. What's pushing some of the foam in the grape juice container climbing up into the airlock?

Oh, the science this ancient alchemy can teach us!

I'd already explained the last time through this, that the brewer's yeast is multiplying and feeding on the sugars in the grape juice. The yeast produces alcohol as a waste product, but it also produces carbon dioxide gas -- or, as Middle Daughter put it, the yeast is pooping and peeing into the juice. The drinks are bubbling, she recalled, because of the carbon dioxide.

And from that, she deduced the physics of the operation: The carbon dioxide had nowhere to go except up, and so up it went, through the stopper and into the airlock. When it reached the airlock, it filled the top bend, and then slowly, inexorably, began to be pushed down by the ongoing rush of other carbon dioxide gas produced as the fermentation process continues apace. And because the juice is full of bubbles, sometimes those bubbles are rising into the airlock, taking miniscule amounts of juice with them.

Not bad for a 9-year-old.

But why does the grape juice have more foam? The girls already understood that the yeast is feeding on the sugars in the juices, so Oldest Daughter speculated that there might be more sugar in the grape juice, which would mean the yeast is producing gas more quickly. She checked the nutrition labels and, sure enough, Welch's grape juice has 36 grams of sugar per serving, as opposed to the 28 grams in the apple cider.

I'll have to ask her later if she can think of a way to test her hypothesis.

And of course, there's the nature of the chemical change under way in the juice. Like most other living organisms, yeast requires food, oxygen and warmth to live; unlike many other organisms, it does not require the oxygen to be chemically unbonded. I explained it last time, though I really should see if the girls remember and understand how exactly this is working.

When I added the brewer's yeast on Wednesday, there already was a fair amount of oxygen dissolved in the juice. The yeast very quickly used this oxygen as it began to consume the sugar in the juice; and during this period, it produced no alcohol. Once that oxygen disappeared, the yeast switched from aerobic metabolic processes to anaerobic. It still consumed oxygen, but that oxygen was present in the sugars, chemically bonded to the hydrogen and carbon items that also comprise sugar molecules.

It's getting less energy from the sugar than before, since the yeast has to consume the oxygen after breaking the bonds between the oxygen and other atoms, but as a direct result, it's producing the alcohol that we want. Like the carbon dioxide, the alcohol is a waste product that eventually will make the juice too toxic for the yeast, just as our own environments eventually would become too toxic for us if we allowed them to fill up with our waste products. The difference is, we like the waste products of the yeast, and the girls' mother and I are looking forward to enjoying them when the yeast culture has run its course.

Physics, chemistry and biology. I wish all my hobbies were this educational, and that all homeschooling lessons could have so rewarding a conclusion.

Teaching with Cinderella

Like many other girls in the United States, Oldest Daughter was just nuts about the Disney Princesses when she was 5.

We restricted TV to two hours a day, but as often as not, those two hours were spent watching Ariel battle the sea witch, or Belle bringing salvation to the enchanted castle of the Beast. Around and about the living room, the kitchen and her bedroom were dolls of Mulan, Tinkerbell, Snow White and Cinderella. And one of her favorite games was to dress up as Cinderella and pretend she was being forced to do housework. (It was hard not to take advantage.)

It's great to see your child excited by something, but when that something is as superficial as the Disney Princesses often are, it can be frustrating as well. As a father, I want my children to focus more on character than on appearances, and too often the marketing driving the Disney Princesses has been concerned with looks. What's a dad to do?

We had fallen into homeschooling because of the policies of local school district. Oldest Daughter had been born two weeks too late to begin kindergarten with her preschool classmates, but she already had begun to unlock the wonders of reading on her own, and we weren't about to miss the opportunity to educate her.

So, wanting to make Oldest Daughter's enthusiasm for Cinderella my ally, I asked her if she would like to hear another version of the story, from Germany. When she agreed, I pulled my beloved copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales down from the bookshelf, and introduced her to Ashenputel, the Cinderella whose stepsisters actually cut off parts of their feet to get into the shoe.

That simple action was the first step on a journey that took us around the world. In the months that followed, we made one trip after another to the local library to discover stories of Cinderella from other countries, other times, and other cultures. When those had finished, we snatched up other fairy tales, wherever we could find them, and made connections to other tales we had read, wherever we could.

With Cinderella alone, Oldest Daughter was exposed to fairy tales from Mexico, Ireland, Cambodia, the Philippines, Germany, Swaziland, England, France, West Virginia, Haiti and Los Angeles. She has seen the fairy godmother as a maid, a grandmother, a magical fish and a bull. Once we even read a story where Cinderella was a boy.

And, more than literature, this was a lesson in geography. Every time we read a fairy tale, Oldest Daughter and I would find the country of origin on our world map, and place a sticker of that country's flag on the map.

It's been seven years since then. My daughter doesn't play the Princess game any more, except where her little sister is concerned. But she still remembers the other Cinderellas whose stories we read, and she's been known to make connections between stories that I never saw.

Not a bad start for homeschooling.

Playing by ear

Oldest Daughter has been doing a decent job learning the piano.

I started pushing her about two weeks ago to start playing the piano for at least half an hour each day, usually at the start of the day. Music is an essential part of being human, and studies have shown that our brains pick up a fundamental connection between music and mathematics, and even between music and speech, so that becoming "fluent" in an instrument can have other benefits. (Some anthropologists have speculated that humans sang before we developed speech.)

Besides, she's been puttering about with our keyboard off and on for years. It was time she got serious.

She's been doing a fantastic job  The only guidance she has received has been to start each song at C-natural, and then figure out from her knowledge of the song which note to play next. It's a method that takes time and patience, and will never get her to Carnegie Hall, but it's got fairly rapid gratification in that a player can usually work out a song fairly quickly.

With no help but her own ear and lots of practice, Oldest Daughter has figured out how to play four or five songs the entire way through a verse, with nary an error aside from the difficulty of maintaining a steady tempo. Today I had her play for me the songs she's worked out, and she played "Holy, Holy, Holy," "My Bonny Lies over the Ocean," "Silent Night" and "Joy to the World." She's also been working on "Peter's Denial" from "Jesus Christ Superstar" and a host of other songs, but she's got the idea.

So today, following her successful performance, I gave her lesson two: Figure out how to play those songs starting at a key other than C-natural, and no, playing it an octave up or down doesn't count. It's got to be a completely different note.

The idea here, of course, is that she is teaching her ear to judge the correct relationships among the keys, and training her fingers to move to the right spots at the same time. While she's doing this, I also am working on getting her to hold her hands correctly, and to use just her right hand for the melody line. We'll start using the left hand for harmony, and then for chords, soon enough.

Meantime, Middle Daughter has received a flute, and is very excited by it. Now we just need to figure out how she can play it, since neither of us knows how, I suspect this means that she will be getting lessons, since I've no idea how to play a flute and would have no clue on where to start.

Book club: 'Jane Eyre'

I've been running a book club out of my house the past few months. After a short break for the holidays, we're getting ready to resume on Jan. 9, when we look at Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre." As always, the club is open to new members as we start a new book.

Often described as an early and influential feminist work because of its focus on the feelings and character of a strong female character, "Jane Eyre" has been adapted into a number of movies, most recently this past year, and into a number of musicals and even operas.

The club generally meets at 11 a.m. Mondays at my house. We'll be looking at a few things over the course of the book, but with a particular focus on Brontë's characterization of her major characters. Other discussions are likely to touch on Brontë's depiction of religion in the persons of Brocklehurst, Helen Burns and St. John Rivers, and on Jane's efforts to maintain her independence in the presence of strong male characters such as Brocklehurst, Rochester and St. John Rivers.

The book club is intended for young teens, but is open to anyone who reads the books and is up for the discussions. There is no charge for the group. Our first discussion, of the first five chapters of "Jane Eyre," is set to begin at 11 a.m. Jan. 9.

Feel free to contact me for directions, or with any other questions.