Author: gentlesoldier

I’ve been saying for nearly 20 years now that typical primary school chess clubs are not the best model for developing chess in this country. Let me explain, in brief, why. I’ll be covering some of my points in more detail in later posts.

Before I continue, I should add that there are a few primary (and prep) schools which have the interest and resources to provide an excellent product, but they are very much the exception, not the rule.

Now don’t get me wrong. Superficially primary school chess clubs are great. The children have a good time and, at least in some clubs, play reasonably quietly. The teachers are happy because they see the children concentrating (more or less) on their games. The parents are happy because it’s a cheap childminding service which might ‘make their kids smarter’. The chess tutors are happy because they get paid for something they enjoy. But the standard of play, by and large, is low, and the number of children who continue playing after primary school is pretty close to zero.

Here’s the sort of thing that usually happens.

A couple of parents knock on the door and say “Hello. My children play chess. Why don’t you start a chess club?” The Head says “What a lovely idea! I read in the paper the other day that ‘chess makes kids smarter'”. So she asks in the staffroom: “Does anyone want to run a chess club?” She’s met by a sea of blank faces. “Chess? No, I don’t know how to play.” “I tried it at school 30 years ago but didn’t get anywhere and can’t remember much anyway.” No success, but never mind. Most of the parents can afford to pay £5 a week for after-school clubs, so she types ‘chess teacher’ into Google and contacts the name at the top of the list. Would she appoint any other teacher in the same way? Probably not, but there we are. Financial arrangements are made, safeguarding checks are carried out and, at the start of next term the parents find ‘chess club’ added to the list of extra-curricular activities.

So the chess teacher arrives. Who is there? There might, if he’s very lucky, be one or two kids who are pretty good and have played on tournaments. There’ll be some kids who have played at home, and because their parents are reasonably proficient players, have some idea what they’re doing. There’ll be some kids who think they’re really good at chess because they can beat their dad, but think a rook is called a castle and that you win by capturing the king. There’ll be some kids who can’t play at all. There will also be a wide age range in the club. It’s not at all easy to keep everyone involved at once.

At one level, yes, it’s great. But, at a higher level, it really doesn’t work very well, does it? I think our children deserve better than this.

The basic problem, it seems to me, is that most children have been taught the basics incorrectly by well-intentioned but ill-informed parents. In principle, there’s a simple solution: put chess on the curriculum. I’ll consider this later, but next I want to consider how we might approach schools and encourage them to be more proactive about how they think about chess.

If you have any interest in chess education you should certainly subscribe to First Rank, a newsletter published by the Education Commission of the European Chess Union.

If you’ve missed any issues, don’t worry. The link to Issue 7 below will enable you to access everything.

First, an explanation. The ECU are promoting chess in schools (up to the age of 11), specifically NOT as a competitive game, but as a learning tool designed to produce social and educational benefits for young children. They call it ‘scholastic chess’, but as this term has a very different meaning in the US I’d prefer to call it ‘educational chess’. We’re told every year at the Chess and Education Conference that this has nothing at all to do with what Carlsen and Caruana play, or even what you and I probably play.

I’d like to draw your attention in particular to Issue No. 7 of First Rank. Here’s what IM Jesper Hall has to say about who should teach ‘educational chess’ in schools. I hope Jesper doesn’t mind that I’ve taken the liberty of making the English a bit more idiomatic.

“Two years ago ECU Education carried out a survey on the CiS (Chess in Schools) movements in Europe. The most striking thing was that every country was struggling with the same main problem: How to teach chess when the goal is to obtain social and intellectual benefits? First of all who should teach? When you teach you need skills in the subject and skills in teaching. Chess instructors have knowledge of chess, but struggle with teaching skills, teachers struggle with the opposite problem. What I believe in is teachers taking care of the younger years, maybe up to 10-11 years of age: after that there will be a need for more chess knowledge and the chess instructors can come in and train the most interested children. The second problem is that the instruction materials normally focus on chess development, and not on the actual goals of CiS. This means that it is even more important to understand how to use the material, and to add good exercises beside the materials.”

I’m sure many of my chess teaching colleagues will disagree with this, and, in particular, would deny that they struggle with teaching skills.

I’ll write a lot more about my views on this later. For the moment, I’d be very interested to hear your views about whether chess in primary schools should be taught, as Jesper thinks, by class teachers or, as usually happens in the US and the UK, by professional chess tutors.

Our second pre-chess game follows on from the pawn game.

Now we introduce the bishop.

Here’s one way schools might choose to use pre-chess games:

1. Demonstrate the game to the whole school during assembly.
2. Announce a date, perhaps in two weeks’ time, for an inter-class (or inter-house, or whatever you prefer) competition.
3. Email the parents with the rules of the game and details of the competition.
4. Publish this on the school website and in the school newsletter.
5. Display posters in classrooms explaining the rules.
6. Encourage children to practise the game during breaks or before school.
7. Run a tournament over half an hour at lunchtime on the agreed date, using the methods outlined here.

As this is an asymmetrical game you might, if you have time, arrange for each pair of players to play twice, once with each colour. If you’re using this as a teaching activity you might also want to experiment with the pawns starting on different squares.

Here’s the starting position. If you don’t have chess sets, use different coloured counters, perhaps choosing a larger counter for the bishop.

The rules:

The bishop moves and captures diagonally, capturing by landing on the square of a black pawn.
The pawns move as in the first pre-chess game.

White wins by capturing or blocking all the black pawns.

Black wins by capturing the white bishop or by getting a pawn to the end of the board SAFELY (where it cannot be captured). So if Black moves a pawn to b1 and the white bishop is on c2, the bishop can capture it and the game continues.

You can play the game online here (the computer doesn’t play very well so you might well win with either colour).

 

1. All children should have the opportunity to play strategy games. Young children enjoy learning new games, and games of this nature provide both social and cognitive benefits.
2. Chess is, in the opinion of many, including myself, the world’s greatest strategy game, with an extraordinary history and heritage as well as an incomparable aesthetic beauty.
3. Most children will be able to master the moves of the pieces by age 7-8, some children younger, and, in a few cases, much younger. So this is a good age to start minichess.
4. Playing a complete game of chess at a reasonably proficient level requires the ability to deal with multidimensional abstract concepts as well as exceptional self-regulatory skills (concentration, impulse control). This is why children should start with minichess: starting with ‘big chess’ is just confusing for most children.
5. Competition is, as long as it’s not overdone or overpressurised, good for young children: it’s a fun way for them to develop a wide range of personal and social skills. Schools should encourage both physical and mental competition, and minichess is a great way to do the latter.
6. Some very bright children with proactively supportive parents can gain enormous pleasure and benefit from playing competitive chess and, in some cases, play at a very high level. These children should be identified and encouraged, but through external centres of excellence, not through schools. Start with minichess in schools, perhaps then leading on to low level ‘big chess’ competition for those who are interested.
7. Most children of primary school age will get much more benefit from playing simpler games which are easier to learn and quicker to play than from playing ‘big chess’. We believe that EVERY primary school child will benefit from playing some of these games.

The purpose of MINICHESS UK is to get ALL children playing chess-based strategy games.

We start with pre-chess games: games which do not use kings and which have aims other than checkmate.

Once children have understood the vital concepts of CHECK, CHECKMATE and STALEMATE they can, if they wish, move onto proper minichess: games where the aim is CHECKMATE but the players start with fewer pieces than in ‘big chess’.

If children are happy playing pre-chess games because they find the concept of checkmate too difficult, that’s absolutely fine.

 

 

I was discussing the pawn game with my virtual friend Paul Swaney a couple days ago. He told me that two of the most prominent US chess teachers considered it silly.

I don’t agree – but perhaps because the aim of Minichess in schools is very specifically NOT to produce prodigies and champions.

(A word of explanation for non-UK readers about our school system. Here, children start school at 4 (you might this too young: I’ll discuss this in another post at some point), and usually change schools at 11. Schools tend to separate Infants (up to age 7) and Juniors (age 7-11), The Junior years,  are Yr3, Yr4, Yr5 and Yr6 – roughly the equivalent of 2nd grade to 5th grade in the US system.)

Instead, we’re trying to get ALL children, not just the brightest in the school, enthused and excited about chess, but only when they’re ready for it. Many children will not be ready for chess until they reach secondary school. So we start with minigames.

There are many minigames which are excellent for tuition purposes but not so suitable for competition. If you don’t have a lot of little guys to get in the way, games will be over too quickly, and with too many big guys as well as little guys the games will last too long.

The pawn game can be learnt in five minutes by all children, certainly from Yr3 (7-8 year olds) upwards, and the games can be played in five minutes. Teachers can learn the rules in a couple of minutes and teach it themselves. You don’t even need chess sets to play it: all you need is a paper board which you can download here and two sets of eight counters of contrasting colours for each player.

As well as physical competitions in running, jumping and throwing, let’s run some mental competitions based on minichess. You can easily run a pawn game competition in half an hour one lunchtime. Suppose you have a two form entry school. You’re then talking about eight teams, one from each form between Yr3 and Yr6. An ideal number for a knock out tournament, but it’s better to run a Swiss System so that everyone plays in all three rounds. Let’s have, say, five children in a team. More if you want. We want to encourage both girls and boys to take part, so you might want to have at least two girls and two boys in each team. Five minutes for each round should be plenty. If you’re running a Swiss you might want to decide whether to use game points or match points to decide pairings and overall winners. Five minutes between rounds for the pairings and five minutes for presentations at the end. Get the whole school involved, either as participants or spectators (you might like some cheerleaders) and in half an hour you’ve got 240 kids really excited about minichess. If your school runs a house system, you could run teams representing houses: perhaps a boys’ team and a girls’ team from each house, with at least one player from each year in each team. You might want to run a handicap system: Yr5 and Yr6 children start without one of their pawns when playing against Yr3 and Yr4 children. You might want to include a teachers’ team, or get the winning team to play the teachers. If you run it after school you could have a parents’ team as well. Run one of these events every term, one every half term, or one every week if you like.

Publish the rules on the school website and in the school newsletter. Put posters explaining the rules in every classroom. Don’t forget: it’s (virtually) free as well. You don’t need expensive chess tutors like me. You don’t even need any special equipment. With any luck it won’t just be fun for the children: it will bring both academic and social benefits as well.

If you’re in my part of the world I might even come in for free and help you run it if you ask me nicely.