Hints for new chess club

I am starting a new chess club for 4th-6th graders and wanted to get some input from more experienced scholastic coaches:

1)      Until I can find another helper, it will be just me with about 15 students of varying abilities. What kind of things do you do to keep all the students engaged? A better way to rephrase this whole question might be, can you give me an itinerary of what you do during your chess club meetings?  Any input would help to give me ideas.

2)      For the ones who come to the first meeting as beginners, how do you handle that? If you are using chess software, what software do you use?

3)      What particular things have you done which really worked to make chess club more fun for the kids?

Can't help You, but can wish  You good luck!

well a couple tips, try to group players by abilities, have them play you, so you can rank them . 3 groups novice, intermediate, and exceptional players. With this approach you need to break down your time in the club in discussion, play, and ability improvement ie:( the good play with the bad). believe me it helps both. If you have a majority of novice, have the better players switch out and teach the novice, while you work with the advanced  and intermediate players. The mixed play is very important to improve the novice and intermediate and sharpen skills of the advanced, but it should be limited, or your advanced players will get bored. Everyone should be challenged. good luck.

I'm currently starting year 11, but when I was in grade 4-6 I joined a few small school chess cirriculums, kind of like a 5 week program where once a week we would go there with about 10 other people our age. I think the best program was the one where on the first day we all wrote our names on a nametag and stuck that to our top. Then we always started the lesson with about 30 minutes of learning and then 30 minutes of free games where we would play a different person each week. In the learning part, we would analyse games or positions at a pretty basic level, provided everyone new the rules and stuff before they joined the club. An example of this was when we went over that game where Morphy beat that Duke person and he was explaining all the moves to us. He explained a few opening tricks, middlegame tricks and endgame tricks, in particular, king and queen vs king, king and 2 rooks vs king and on the last day, king and rook vs king.

I hope your new club is a success. Good luck!