How to tech 3yr old how to play Chess?

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luke_uk

I would like to teach my daughter playing Chess. I'm trying to get her familiar with peaces and how they move on the board. She is very excited about it and if I ask "do you want to play Chess?" she will stop whatever she's doing and give her full atention to it. It's quite strage because this is the only thing she gaves her full attention to. I would like to leverage it. Could you recommend me some sources where I can read what is the best way to do it?

Thank you.

kikvors

Does she play any other games already? My own daughter of that age has problems with the concepts of following rules, the players doing alternate moves, and of trying to win. I'm trying to teach her some very simple other games first.

There are chess mini games; for instance, play with the pawns only, first to get a pawn to the other side wins. Maybe add kings, maybe not.

Raindrop chess is fun too, but probably for later.

Slightly more long term, she needs other kids around who also play the game, I don't think she'll stay interested if she can only play chess with you.

luke_uk

Thank you, this is a valid point about other children. She plays other games but she doesn't get the concept of compeating. She also get very upset when I try to attack her knighs. She calls them horsers and I can't touch them ^^. This is why I find this task challanging. I'm tyring to teach her very abstract ideas in such an early age. I believe it's possible but requires an idea I don't have at this moment.

kikvors

Very recognizable :-) My own daughter (just turned 4) will get out the chess board and pieces, and tell me "Daddy, we're going to play chess now, but the kings can stand next to each other!" (I foolishly tried to explain to her one day that that wasn't allowed...)

Her favorite game is to get two sets of pieces, and put all the white pieces on the white squares, and the black pieces on the black squares so the entire board is full of pieces.

OneOfTheseKnights

Luke, I have a 6 and a 3 year old, both playing after a fashion.  I started them with one rook and showed them how to take a piece.  Then I would put more pieces on the board and they had to find which one to take, adding their second rook to give them more options.  After that I would start to add a defending rook to some pieces.  And after that place some of their own pawns in the way of their rooks.  This works for the bishops as well.  And if they can do bishops and rooks you will find that they learn the queen quite easily.

Pawn promotion games are easy to teach.  So are basic queen and 2-rook mates.

My 6 year old can play a basic game but I have to remind her all the time that the object is to learn to think, that she should always think out loud with me, and that the only mistake is to look blankly at the board.  Her biggest breakthrough was to learn to set out a position from a diagram and to play from notation: she taught herself to do this without any prompting and not much help.  When playing games, I always let them win, usually by playing a few dud moves that let them win material (eg. moving a pinned piece) or changing sides a few times during the game.