Read, Write, Checkmate: Enrich Literacy with Chess Activities

Read, Write, Checkmate both teaches chess to students and provides educators with an outline for a classroom literacy project. Chess expert, Alexey Root, describes her project to have kids read and write about chess while learning to play and excel at the game. Patterned after an actual project undertaken with 25 middle school students, this book features all you need to know to teach kids to play well and reinforce their reading and writing skills at the same time. All activities are linked to the NCTE/IRA national standards for language arts. Lesson plans, over 100 chess diagrams, parent letters, annotated bibliographies and all other needed information project in the classroom is included. Grades 3-8.

ALEXEY W. ROOT has a Ph.D. in education from UCLA. Her work history includes public high school teaching (social studies and English). Her most notable chess accomplishment was winning the U.S. Women's championship in 1989. Since the fall of 1999, Root has been a senior lecturer at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD). She has taught UTD education classes, tutored prospective teachers for certification exams, and supervised student teachers. Root's current assignment for UTD is to teach, via the UT TeleCampus, online education courses that explore the uses of chess in classrooms. Children and Chess: A Guide for Educators (2006) and Science, Math, Checkmate: 32 Chess Activities for Inquiry and Problem Solving (2008) were both published by Teacher Ideas Press.