Chess in the Library update

Posted by Yuanling Yuan:

"For all of you who has been following our progress, we have HUGE news for you! First things first, the Chess in the Library program has suddenly jumped from 3 libraries to 6 confirmed libraries! They are (in order of starting date): Brookbanks, Pleasant View, Maria A. Shchuka, Deer Park, Northern District and Fairview. The program at Deer Park library will be starting on the same date as Maria A. Shchuka library, which is Nov 7th, 2009. Michael's blog has more interesting information regarding the Deer Park library. Check it out! The other two libraries, Northern District and Fairview, will be starting next January. Please visit our website http://www.chessinthelibrary.com/ to see the exact starting dates and addresses for all the new libraries.

Second, I would like to announce that we have received another donation toward our program. My team and I all really appreciate it. This donation isn't a large amount, but it represents support and trust, which are far more important. Seeing more and more people using their actions to show us that they care about the program is one of our biggest motivations in making this program bigger and better. You can read the full report regarding this donation at my blog.

Last but not least, we might add a new feature to our program. For a long time now, my team and I (especially Michael) have been discussing about a new aspect for our program - teaching. Every week when we go to the libraries to organize the program, we see a couple kids making illegal moves and agreeing on checkmates that are clearly not checkmates. We explain to them the rules every time but it then starts to get repetitive. The same issue would come up more than a few times because due to the lack of time, we only briefly explain the concepts and the kids simply cannot remember it. Thus, giving some lectures once every week or two for the first half an hour would be very effective to their chess improvements. We want to help them improve as much as possible. Of course, this isn't something that you can think of one day and start doing the next day. Our biggest challenge is, how are we going to teach the kids? We can't teach using a standard board, we need a demo board at each library.

Adding this new feature to our program not only will increase the amount of our participants, it will also increase the average chess level. As much as my team and I want to teach the kids, we simply cannot do so at the moment due to the lack of demo boards. Let us know what you think of this idea! If you like the idea of this new feature and wants to support it by making a donation (a demo board, money, anything!), please contact me at yuanling_1@yahoo.com. Your donation will be greatly appreciated by the kids (mainly them) and us!!"