NEW PALESTINE — The students are learning mental and strategic skills — things they’ll be able to use for a lifetime.
And here’s the kicker: The teaching tool doesn’t have anything to do with a computer screen or smartphone.
Students at New Palestine Intermediate School have fallen in love with an old-time board game taught with a new twist — chess. Their instructor, Will Molinar, an instructional assistant at New Palestine High School, is using the game to get students to develop competitive and mathematical skills.
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Click here to purchase photos from this gallery“You can’t help but learn something when you’re playing the game of chess,” Molinar said.
Molinar likes to quote one of the nation’s founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, who once referred to chess has a metaphor for life.
“You have resources at your disposal, and we have to sort of galvanize the troops in our life to overcome obstacles and make sacrifices,” Molinar said.
Molinar is a 1993 Greenfield-Central High School graduate. He teaches the game in a way for students to learn about problem-solving, point values and making sacrifices for the betterment of an overall positive outcome — like using a pawn to set up a move to capture the king.
Chess Club, an after-school activity at New Palestine Intermediate, has been offered to Southern Hancock fifth-and sixth-graders this school year, and dozens of kids are taking part.
Molinar works with a group of educators called Cloud City Youth, an after-school enrichment program whose philosophy is to enrich students by helping them discover their passions. Chess is one of the ways the program helps students have fun while learning valuable lessons and skills. Molinar and his wife, Jenna, his assistant, teach four to five different chess classes at different schools throughout Indiana each week.
While he doesn’t think educators should go back to using an abacus, he likes using other forms of teaching than just technology.
“With chess there are lots of technical and mathematical obstacles to overcome, and that’s like life,” Molinar said. Depending on the student, some have an aptitude for this kind of problem-solving learning, Molinar has discovered.
With point values assigned to the chess pieces, Molinar makes sure his lesson plans are designed to show the students how important each piece is and how best to use them. This kind of conceptual thinking, he said, is important for children at the intermediate grade school level to grasp. Students agree.
“Chess really makes you think a little more,” said Taylor Burke, a fifth-grader.
She joined the after-school club in hopes of learning more about the strategy within the game so she could one day beat her father, who introduced her to the game.
Cailynne Sumner, a sixth-grader, likes the game because it makes her think before she acts, she said. While she has downloaded a chess app on her iPod since joining the club, playing the game in person is “way better” than playing any kind of game she has on her device.
Molinar likes to use chess as sort of transitional tool. While he doesn’t discourage technology and what it has to offer students, he wants them to understand there are other ways of learning and having fun.
He first introduced chess to the club via a fairy tale story about a king who was the ruler of 64 squares. He tries to make the game sound fun, and it has worked.
Jack Kleiman, a sixth-grader, didn’t really want to be part of the club, but his mom signed him up. He’s glad she did.
“It’s so much fun,” Jack said. “I’ve learned a lot about strategy, and this is probably one of my favorite things to do now because I’m good at it.”
Jaden Junkins, a fifth-grader, plays the game all the time and was one of the students who wasn’t new to the game when the club started.
“I signed up just so I could come here and play against different people,” he said. “I love this game.”
Molinar told the students who didn’t understand the game at first not to worry. In time, he told them, they’d learn to make the right moves and progress.
Molinar, a wrestling, cross country and track star in high school, also likes the fact that chess allows students who are not competitive on an athletic field a chance to learn about competition.
“They may not be able to beat Johnny on the football field because he’s bigger than they are, but they can beat him on the chess board because they can use their brain,” Molinar said.
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“Chess teaches foresight, by having to plan ahead; vigilance, by having to keep watch over the whole chess board; caution, by having to restrain ourselves from making hasty moves; and finally, we learn from chess the greatest maxim in life – that even when everything seems to be going badly for us we should not lose heart, but always hoping for a change for the better, steadfastly continue searching for the solutions to our problems.”
― Benjamin Franklin
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