In the age of social media where attention spans are getting shorter, Chess can be a powerful tool for nurturing a child’s mind. Among other qualities, Chess develops patience, concentration, pattern recognition, rational thinking, and imagination. Many schools and state governments in India having realized the benefits of chess in students’ lives have introduced the ‘Chess in Schools’ project. Even a 3-year-old can learn to play chess and enjoy its benefits!
Here are some fun ways to get your little ones interested in chess, without needing a screen or expert chess knowledge yourself:
Mini games
Here all the pieces move exactly the same way as in the game of chess, but rules can be ‘adjusted’ to aid the learning process. A chess mini-game involves a limited number of pieces and a simple set of rules. A few examples are:
Pawn Wars
Setup: Place only the 8 pawns on their starting position for each side – without any other pieces, even the King! The pawns move exactly the same way as in an actual chess game: 1 or 2 steps forward on their 1st move, then 1 square ahead each until they reach the Queening square, while being able to capture diagonally. Both sides take turns to make a move.
Aim: The side to make a Queen first, wins!
Benefits: Learn pawn movement, pawn captures and pawn promotion.
Gobble the Chocolate
Setup: Place a piece, for example a Rook in the center of the board. Then place a few chocolates on certain squares either on the same file or rank as the Rook, or a little away so that the Rook will have to work hard to capture it!
Objective: To capture as many chocolates as possible.
Benefits: Clarifies Piece movement, in this case the Rook’s, efficiently.
You can introduce several variations in these mini-games. For example, in the diagram below, which of these chocolates can the Knight gobble up on it’s next move?
Knight gobbles up the chocolates
Children’s chess books
I recently noticed my coach’s laptop cover filled with stickers with words like ‘Believe’, ‘You can do it’, etc. He explained that they were his four-year-old’s doing. She had picked them up from a children’s chess book named ‘Chesspa in the Adventure Park’, a popular book in the Indian chess community. My sister often reads it to my six-year-old niece as a bedtime story, who is extremely fascinated by it. The publishers, Chessbase India, have followed it up with chess activity books for kids.
The International Chess Federation “FIDE” has a Chess in Education website which suggests several such child friendly chess books.
Cross-Disciplinary Learning
Chess can be an interesting segway for Kids to learn about other disciplines such as history, geography and vice versa.
Maths and Geography:
By following a player or a particular tournament, we can look up on the globe where the player is from, or the tournament is being held, and learn more about the weather, food, clothes of that place by observation. A fun exercise can be to trace the cities or countries of origin of the chess world champions and map their journeys.
There are many Mathematical concepts to be found in chess such as probability, geometry and symmetry. One can teach the co-ordinate system by teaching the co-ordinates on the Chessboard – such as learning to identify the square ‘f5’ by its name, or ‘c3’ for that matter.
Pawn races for queening the pawn help to bring in clarity in visualisation and counting.
Art and Literature
Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll is one most imaginative fiction books written for children and it has so many chess references – the Red Queen and the White Queen and a giant Chess board on which Alice acts as a pawn and must run “twice as fast as possible” to move forward to the next square! A poetry session I attended in November had the celebrated lyricist and writer Javed Akhtar narrate his urdu poem on chess!
Why not attend a chess tournament with your kids and ask them to write an essay on their experience? Back in 2013, one such visit to the Anand vs Carlsen World Championship Match in Chennai fuelled a then 7-year-old Gukesh to become the youngest World Chess Champion!
[Fun DIY Project: It has been a lifelong dream of mine to create a colourful chess board! How about you create one with the kids in your home? There are many ways to do it: my version is to paint all the squares and pieces in multicolours, with solid colours for white and stripes for Black.
Do share a photo of your project with me at: soumyaofficial.64@gmail.com]
(Soumya Swaminathan is an International Master and Woman Grandmaster in Chess. She has been World Junior Champion and Commonwealth Gold Medalist)