An interesting aspect of chess is that it can be played equally well by adolescents and seniors alike. Famously, Bobby Fischer shot to stardom at a young age and even played a game touted as "the game of the century" at age 13. There are many concepts though that young children find hard to grasp including consequence of action, tactics and thinking several moves ahead. Luckily though these skills find their way into the game automatically with practice and time. Like many things in life, if chess is learned early it will remain entrained in the memory of the player and will only continue to progress and mature. Learning chess can be a long and arduous endeavor for many children and therefore to enhance the level of succes, chess should be taught incrementally and must (and I mean must) remain fun and exciting at all times. The remainder of this article is devoted to explaining tried and tested methodologies used to teach chess in phases by progressively introducing piece recognition, board configuration, piece movement, piece capture and finally chess itself.
Piece recognition can be taught with a game I like to call Shout Chess. The aim of the game is to simply pick a piece, shout it's name and move the piece to an unoccupied square anywhere on the chess board. The game starts with the board configured as if you were about to play a game of chess. Players take turns in moving. Pieces are removed from the board (captured) when they are surrounded by two or more opponent pieces on adjacent squares. If a player moves out of turn, incorrectly names a piece or plays an opponents piece, the move is forfeit and the piece is returned. The game is won when the king is taken, or the king is the only piece remaining. This simple game has few rules but does require forethought and simple strategy. For example, pieces may be safely captured by first placing a guard piece. The introduction of strategy is by design as the child will progressively realize that some strategy is required. This game is designed to teach piece recognition, taking turns, the concept of capturing and simple strategy.
Once the child is comfortable with Shout Chess, introduce a means of picking the player to move first by initially playing a quick game of Speed Board. Speed Board simply involves the act of taking one turn each to setup the chess board as quickly as possible. While one player configures the board the other player counts 60.The winner is the player who configures the board in the least possible time or was not the player who failed to configure the board within 60 seconds. The winner of this prestigious game will have the honor of moving first in the next game of Shout Chess.
The next variation of Shout Chess may be introduced after the child is confidently familiar with the rules of Shout Chess. This variation inherits all the previous rules of Shout Chess with the exception that pieces can no longer be placed anywhere on the chess board, but must now instead be moves as per the rules of normal chess. Depending upon the age of your child, you may need to introduce this rule progressively by first allowing pieces to jump each other or move only like a bishop or a rook. Slowly introduce the moves of each piece and ultimately end by teaching your child that knights are the only piece that can jump and that the pawn can move two squares on the first move. This is the most complicated step in the learning process and care must therefore taken to ensure your child enjoys this phase. Measure your child's enjoyment levels and slow the introduction of new moves if the fun factor diminishes. Patience and perseverance are necessary requirements.
The final phase is to introduce the concepts of piece capture, check and checkmate. At this point, your child should fully understand what it means to capture a piece. Here we tweak the rules of Shout Chess by explaining that you no longer need to surround a piece to capture it, but instead knock them off the board when you land on the same square as them. We may also remove the mandatory requirement to shout the name of each piece as it is played and may even start calling the game chess. Wait a few matches before explaining the diagonal capture rule of pawns. Explain check as a warning the your king may be captured on the next go. Protection of the king is a crucial part of Shout Chess and therefore should not be a foreign concept to your child. Eventually introduce the more advanced concepts of castling, pawn promotion and en passant as your child's confidence levels increase.
At this point, your child is now able to understand the rules of chess and can play chess at a basic level. Using incremental techniques the process has remained fun and exciting and your child has therefore enjoyed the learning process. Good luck and happy memory building.
