Classroom News

Year 5/6 Chess Tournament

By Heidi Mc

Chess club, supervised and organised by Brody Driscoll, has been running again for the year three to sixes at Alphington Primary for most of the year. On Thursday the 7th of September, 21 students from Year 5 and 6, who all had been attending chess club each week, got the opportunity to participate in an interschool chess tournament at Viewbank Primary. The tournament had13 schools, including APS take part, and each school had sent different chess players of varying skills and abilities, from Grades 2 up to Grade 6. There were around eighty contestants all together, which meant approximately forty chess boards were set up across the gym where the tournament took place. 

Across the day all players played seven games of chess, and the winners of the tournament were decided by the highest point score. 

If a contender won a game, they got a point, if they drew or stalemated a game, they got half a point, and if they lost a game, they got no points. If scores were the same, the higher achiever would be decided by adding up the points of the people they played, to see who had the toughest competition. This was called a ‘higher tiebreaker score’. The highest amount of points a participant could gain was obviously seven points, a point for each game. Kierstin T from Year 5 got a Silver Second Place Medal and Christian N from Year 6 received a Bronze Third Place Medal. This is a pretty awesome achievement as they were up against eighty people- some of whom had played chess from the moment they could talk.

Thanks to her high score of five points on the day, Kierstin is able to compete in the State Girls Chess Final next term. Christian, Angus W and Lucas A are also heading to the State Open Semi Finals.

There are different state competitions for girls and boys, and the threshold for getting into the state semifinals for boys was 4.5 points, and for girls was 3.5 points due to the lack of numbers. Overall, each and every one who participated should be extremely proud of their performance, as everybody had an absolute ball and achieved the two goals set by Northern Star Chess, who ran the tournament. They were to have fun and learn something! The day was one that no one will ever forget, as each student was king and queen of the chess board on that day… Checkmate! 

Grade 3 and Prep Connections Paper Chain! 

We are some of the Grade 3 students. On Friday 18th of August we had our National Day of Action Against Bullying at Alphington PS. It was also our house event for the term so we were all in our house colours. The Bullying No Way! day had a focus which was “Growing Connections”. We learnt that growing connections is important because it can help prevent bullying. 

We were then lucky enough to have the Prep students join us so that we could do an activity together! The Grade 3 and Prep students made a huge paper chain! We each made a link for the paper chain and joined them together using the 4 house colours. On our paper chain we drew different things that make us feel connected. Some things that we drew were our families, APS, our classmates, we drew our sports groups, our interests and hobbies as well as things we enjoyed doing with others! It was so much fun working together and seeing how we are connect at APS!  

You can see how big our chain is in the photo below! 

Thanks for reading,  

Miles, Ayden, Sarrinah, Estelle, Elias, Atika, and all the Grade 3 and Prep students!