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Posted by heroLFG (Gavin Palmer) ·

Project: Teach My Son Chess

My son is 5 years old.  I started teaching him chess last week.  He has asked me to play chess with him last night and this morning.  I am trying to start by teaching him to identify each piece and the moves they can make.  I am ignoring the castle move where the king gets to do a strange exceptional move.  I am ignoring "in passing" capture for pawns.  I have mentioned "pawn promotion", but I am avoiding this move.  I am not trying to think more than one move ahead.  I am thinking out loud for my move and often for my son's move.  I will allow my son to change his mind.  I plan on playing chess with my son tonight.

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heroLFG (Gavin Palmer) heroLFG (Gavin Palmer)
I played two games with my son last night.  He can identify all the pieces.  He knows the basic moves for the rook, knight, bishop, queen, and king.  The pawns are harder for him to understand.  I demonstrated the castling move as an option for him, but he was not interested.  He also saw pawn promotion for the first time.  In the first game, he would forget which color he was.  I explained that is one of the first things to remember when playing.

In the first game (3rd total) he moved the knight around a lot and did some moves that he had to walk back after I threatened his knight.  I ended up with many pawns opening up my back pieces while all of his back pieces were blocked by his pawns.  I tried to explain to him what happened after the first game.  I wanted him to practice thinking about how his move would be wasted if I moved a pawn and threatened his knight.  I wanted him to understand that he could move a pawn to open up his back pieces and have more choices on his next turn.

In the second game (4th total) he decided he wanted to get more of my pieces.  He didn't move his knight around like the first game.  He also opened up some of his back pieces.  He traded pieces with me.  But one time he was willing to trade a pawn for his knight, and I tried to explain that isn't usually a good trade.

I am interested in trying to play chess in my mind without a need to reference the real world pieces.  In order to do that I will need a board with numbers and letters.  My daughter who is 3 years old is interested in "helping" play chess.  Perhaps I can get her to move my pieces for me when I declare my move.  Perhaps my son would be interested in moving my pieces for me when I declare my move.
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Elliot, Fallible Ideas Elliot
You aren't doing this as an organized project. You don't have a clear plan, goals, resources, metrics to judge success, etc. And it's a really complex, hard project. It has tons of complicated factors and prerequisites. It's not suitable for learning project organization. It'd be more effective for learning if you get involved with the activities I've been proposing here.
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