How to help (very) low-rated children "Get it" ?

You have to keep it very, very simple.

Try simple games and exercises with only 3 or 4 pieces on the board where they have to capture or find what pieces are threaten. Make it slowly, for example one set of exercises for rook captures alone one day. Next day the bishop, and so.

Only when they can handle how all pieces capture and are able to find all the pieces that are threaten by a given piece you can move to the next step.

You can read the blog of a scholastic chess teacher here:

http://lizzyknowsall.blogspot.com/

You'll have to wade through the recent posts about being pregnant and making babies however.

Her 6th Grade chess curriculum was a good read:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4cRSlVgLWb6SGN5Rlh0clhQWUU/edit?usp=sharing

It seems that the people who say "It's a game not a lifestyle" usually aren't very good at it...just an observation. It is very much a lifestyle, when you never go a day without working at chess and spend thounsands of dollars on tournaments.

The funny thing is, he doesn't seem to have trouble solving mate-in-ones or one-move forks...most of the time. He just can't apply them in his games.

I think the 'pay attention' thing depends on the kid's natural temperament.

My elder son is oblivious of threats and just looks at his own ideas, while my second son is more of the careful type. But when I explained to the first that he would stop losing to his younger brother as soon as he would stop giving him pieces for free, he started to take a little care and won some games...

So I guess, it's a question of motivation. For kids, chess is still very much a game first. If losing is no fun, they may try to improve their play.

It's a tricky thing, I think. Because, yes, if a kid is pushed into chess, you do risk that he (she) is bored and all of that. But, if it turns out a kid would have been great for chess but just quit too soon, if he starts at 14 or something he's already quite limited compared to if he started at 8 or something. So I think we should be mindful of both extremes. Don't make it torture for the kids, but eliminating kids based on a very small time frame of "inferior" performances could be hasty to the point of being inaccurate. People can very much gain rating points really suddenly, especially as a young kid.

Indeed though I'm just thinking out loud. I don't have any actual experience with this sort of thing.

I don't have an issue with introducing children to the game, but for those who want to use chess as a tool to teach critical thinking skills need to stop and do a little critical thinking themselves. Most teachers are following a curriculum and they have very little chess skill of their own. What do they do with those kids who do "get it" and encounter a child whose playing ability exceeds their own? The answer isn't in a book. They need to bring in outside help to develop that talent. As-is most school systems fail in following up leaving that potential talent wasted.

I think one important thing to keep in mind is to always expect them to make tactical mistakes. One thing I learned about chess is that if you never make tactical mistakes, you are already an 1800+ rated player without any positional or open knowledge needed. A computer doesn't know anything about opening theory or positional chess, it just never makes tactical mistakes and no human can even beat a computer.

So in that vein, you should be ambitious about their improvement, but remember that most players below 1800 rating will miss forks/pins etc.) especially in blitz.

However, one thing I would encourage is to separate out kids not who are most talented, but by who is most motivated, and only play those kids yourself. Use your best judgement, but playing them with your best ability and crushing them in 10 moves can be a very good learning opportunity. I know that this is a pattern I use with everything I know:

1: To improve my sight reading on piano, I sight read things ABOVE my normal level

2: To learn Civilization 3, I went straight to the hardest difficulty and got crushed over and over so that I learned how to play the game without ANY handicaps, and all difficulty levels below it seemed easy.

3: When I started playing chess, I played against the hardest computer. I still haven't won a game against it. I analyzed the games and played back bad moves that dropped pieces.

This doesn't work for everyone, but for me, this is how I learn all my new skills. Heck, this wasn't planned, but I even started learning how to drive during the winter with ice on the roads and 5 foot tall snow banks around turns. I will have no issues in the Spring :)

The point of this isn't to motivate them to get better. The point is to teach them a skill much more important than good chess, good analysis. I know nothing about teaching kids chess, but I do know about teaching kids skills are learning skills, and lots of stuff I say will be incorrect or not apply, but the general idea could work.

There's one big reason why playing against the hardest computer and losing in 10 moves helped me. When I first played chess, I thought that I was just making tactics mistakes left and right and had no hope. It was not until I played the hardest computer and analyzed my games that I realized something amazing- I was only making the same 2 or 3 mistakes! That's something I would have never realized if I had just kept trying to "make it work" at people equal to my level (I am rating 1251 now, I must have been rating 600 when I started). I discovered that the same tactics mistake I made over and over (from whites perspective) was dropping the B and G pawns by moving the bishops when they were attacked, and inadaquately defending the C pawn from Nc6, Nb4, Nxc2 fork.

Now will these kids be able to analayze with the same motivation as a 15 year old? Probably not. I'm not suggesting you sit down with them for 2 hours and teach them analyze. The only thing you should draw from this post is that teaching good practice is better than teaching good results, and if the point of this is to help kids in general then good practice and study abilities will help them with anything in life.

And as people have said, above all, make sure they are having fun, and recognize the value of 6 year olds that love to play chess!

call me a dog

well that's fair enough

My daughter is now 11, is rated USCF 1100, and has been playing at least one tournament a month for four years.  When she started in her school chess club in the 2nd grade, and then in USCF tournaments soon after, her rating hovered between 100-300 for the first year.  In 2012 her average rating was 200 (with lows in the 100's), in 2013 her average was 500, in 2014 her average was 900, and she passed 1100 already in 2015.  

I am now teaching my 4-year old son chess with the same methodology, and after learning a lot from the time with my daughter, I think I've got it down pretty well.  I use a combination of three books: "Chess is Child's Play", Igor Sukhin's "Chess Camp" series, and the Step Method (stepping stones 1 and 2).

I break up the material into three phases:  "pre-mate" for about a year, then "mate in one" for another year, and the final phase includes mate in two and threats to deliver mate.  In each of the phases I also teach concepts to win material using increasingly complicated ideas, and start drilling Bain's positions during mate in 1 phase.  I also teach basic endgames throughout like rook vs two pawns (no kings) or king and pawn vs king in phase 1, and then phase two we add kings and do the basic endgame mates like two rooks vs king, etc..  By phase three we're doing things (with kings) like rook vs bishop, queen vs knight, two bishop mate, etc.  My daughter is well beyond these simple endings and is trying to perfect bishop and knight vs king.

During the "pre-mate" phase (100-300 rating), we focus on piece moves and piece safety with only two to three pieces on the board at a time.  The more pieces the more complicated ("noisier") it becomes for kids, and the further away the pieces are from each other, the harder it is to see.  You can take one position with two/three pieces close together, and simply move them apart, change the orientation on the board, or add in superfluous pieces, and you have a life-time supply of simple board vision puzzles.

During this phase I teach them proper chess vocabulary which also teaches basic chess logic -- terms/ideas like "move", "attack", "double attack", "defend", "capture", "block", "pin", "count", etc.  Make them use the right vocabulary (eg, "capture" instead of "take", or "move" instead of "go").  You should also reinforce basic things like how to physically capture a piece using one hand, placing pieces in the center of the squares, taking turns, the names of files/ranks/diagonals, squares are light/dark while pieces are black/white, etc.  When we set up positions I give my son his pieces and tell him which squares they go on.  It can take him a while, but he can always finds it.

But you can also teach pretty advanced ideas with this limited material, like identifying pieces that are on the same line (for a pin/skewer/fork), learning to see when a piece is undefended, the basic value of material, etc.  I setup very simple positions like a white pawn attacking a black rook and a black knight, and ask him what white should play.  This reinforces how the pawn moves, as well as piece values, and defended/undefended pieces.  In some positions I'll let him move the pieces, other times I'll ask him questions before he moves like "what is that piece's job?", or "what will black play if you capture his pawn?".  Already he can visualize little two-three ply combinations and he can argue with me about variations that aren't even on the board!  

Here is a great example that my son and I just did this weekend (there should NOT be kings, but chess.com makes you include them!!):

This simple position with only four pieces (ignore the kings) teaches a LOT.  We spent about 10 minutes on this one position and reviewed a TON of important foundational ideas.  Here's how the discussion went.  

I always start by asking two questions:  "what is the material?", and then "what is going on here?".  He told me material is equal, and then saw the pin.  First you have to "see" the pieces in a line, which can take some coaching, but this time he found it right away.  I've already taught other line concepts using pieces that attack in a line (double attacks, laser attacks, and pins).  He was able to tell me that the white knight is pinned to the queen.  Then we walked through the "count" on the knight, and what would happen if it was black's turn right now.  He did 90% of this himself.  He looked at a bunch of queen moves, but I would ask "and what would black do?", and every time he saw that he loses his knight.  He then started looking at knight moves, and each time I'd ask "what is the knight's job there (defending/attacking)?", and "what would black play?".  He eventually found that the knight can move out of the pin to f2 which both defends the white queen and attacks the black queen.  And after the little black bishop takes the big white queen, white is now down a lot of material, so what should white play next?  A common mistake is to follow the flow of captures and to take the bishop instead of the queen.  He is now drilling these simple positions using chess position trainer (just 5-10 a day).  If I see he is sill having problems with a particular idea then I'll setup that same position just swapping colors, or rotating it slightly, and hopefullly he'll find the concepts much faster next time.

Another fun concept at this age that also reinforces piece safey is "restriction".  You start with two pawns on adjacent files a knight's move away -- they are restricting each other.  You can build up to positions where you are trapping knights and can play queen vs knight mini-games, or queen and rook vs bishop.  And on and on.  My older daughter plays these mini-games with my son since it's good for both of them!

After almost a year on "pre-mate" positions, we transition to mate in 1 with several mini games.  I'll spare you all the details of this, unless you're interested!

Finally, there are two fun chess variants that emphasize piece safety and basic board vision -- "give away chess", where you must make a capture if you have one and the goal is to give away all of your pieces first, and "progressive chess" where white starts with one move, then black gets two moves, white gets three, etc.  

Just stay focused on one concept at a time -- piece safety first, and once they have that 99% down (after several months of intentional practice), you can add "what did your opponent's move threaten"?

Hope that is all helpful.

you should teach them basic mates

they like chess dvds too

Anyway, I didn't know you were a coach. Did you get a job at some school or something?

Doirse, that was remarkably helpful, im going to try some of this stuff with my two, aged 4 and 7. weve used some of the the same stuff, but youve really got this down. thankyou very much!

I remeber house hunting sec]veral years ago, and seeing signs along side the roads that read ...

Slow

Children

Why would these neighbors want to advertise they have stupid kids?! ;^)

My younger brother went to a chess camp when he was a kid and I went along just to see what it was all about.
Most of the kids there left their pieces hanging left and right and results were quite random.
My brother lost the first tournament they had there and was really sad, so I took some time with him and looked over about 40 - 50 pages of "Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess". Essantaially 1 page had 2 puzzels of mate in 1 or mate in 2.
He started solving them quite quickly after I cheered him up and told him how good he was doing when he solved the puzzles.
When we finished I played a game with him and told him to forget about openings and planning and to just make sure he isn´t leaving a piece hanging and to check if the opponent left something hanging. If not then just make a random move. So I purposely left some pieces hanging here and there and asked every move if he has checked everything.
The next tournament he came in second place.

You can download J.Polgar's course.What you may need is chess training for post-beginners  or chess from beginner to club player. The latter is also in downloadable format. Also check here these discounts if anything suits you. You can read some posts with beginners advice on this site.

Telling a young child to slow down and be careful doesn't work very well as you've discovered.  What works much better is to train the child to quickly spot hanging pieces and one and two-move tactics.  Obviously, doing (and repeating) tactical puzzles will help.  Paradoxically, blitz will help as well, as blitz allows you to play and repeat many tactical positions.  Finally, for hanging pieces, I strongly recommend Bruce Alberston's chess mazes.  He has two books of them (Chess Mazes and Chess Mazes 2).  You can also find some of his puzzles online.   My son did a bunch of Alberston's chess mazes when he was starting out and the improvement was noticeable.

Most kids will slow down as they get older.  Part of it is that they are maturing, but I think an even bigger factor is that they just start seeing more over the board and it takes them longer to process the possibilities.  However, they won't start seeing more unless they have added hundreds or even thousands of patterns into their memory banks.

I'm glad that helped!  I found that those three books form a complete set of beginner instructional material.  I'd recommend you start with "Chess is Child's Play" for great ideas/techniques for teaching basic piece movement.  There's an entire chapter on ways to teach each individual piece starting with the line pieces (rook, bishop, then queen) instead of the pawn, which makes a LOT of sense.  

Once they get comfortable with how the pieces move, I then add Step Method Stepping Stone 1 positions, and some positions from Sukhin's chess camp.  You'll see there is very clear overlap in the material that provides nice reinforcement.  We go through each position slowly together over a board (usually sitting on the floor, because he cant reach the pieces at the table) focusing on once single concept at a time.  It's cool to see how some ideas take them a while while other ideas they just "get".  For example playing a simple mini-game with my son using just the rooks and bishop, and he says "your bishop is pinned" before I had even taught him! He just kind of had a "well, duh" look on his face!  I'm sure he learned it by watching his older sister, but it was totally cool to see.  So I found all the positions in Chess Camp 1 involving pins, and we've been doing that for the past week or so.  

Once he "gets" the idea I then add the Sukhin positions to Chess Position Trainer but might change them somehow (like move the pieces further apart, or rotate the position, to make is slightly different).  

Every day he spends about 10-15 minutes on chess -- he'll review the CPT positions (there are about 200 in there at this point, but the scheduler only gives him roughly 5-6 positions a day), and he does 1-2 worksheets from stepping stones 1.  On the weekends I'll add one or two new ideas, and we'll play some mini-games.  I always try to keep it light and fun, but I do have rules like he has to use proper chess vocabulary, and he has to handle the pieces properly.  For example he likes to turn his queen into a rocket ship when he captures something, which I let him do as long as his "rocket ship" moves like a queen in straight lines across the board and doesn't jump up high and the air and crash down on the target!!  I also keep the rest of the pieces in the case and out of sight, otherwise he crafts elaborate towers or tries to add them to the board...sometimes in fun ways like "if I had a knight on this square, then he would be attacking your rook", and I'll play through his little variation and talk about what happened (like what the material would be), but then I put the knight out of sight and get him to refocus on the actual lesson/position.

We started this last fall and are about half-way through Chess Camp 1, which is ONLY "pre-mate" positions.  Chess Camp 2 is all mate-in-1 positions, and the Stepping Stones 1 and 2 have lots of cool exercises to transition into checkmates.  So my goal is to finish all of the "pre-mate" positions in Stepping Stones 1 and 2 at the same time as we finish Chess Camp 1, hopefully in the next 6-7 months.  There are over a dozen mini-games we play too.

By the time we start the "mate in one" phase, he'll have already been introduced to the three defensive ideas when in check, the difference between checkmate and stalemate, and several mating patterns.  We'll focus on Chess Camp 2 for the actual mate in one positions, while the Step Method will cover mate in one AND more tactical ideas for winning material.  At some point towards the end of that one-year phase, and depending on how he's doing, I'll start adding simple endgames.

My only problem is that he wants to go faster and play entire games like his sister -- she'll play with him and the only "rule" is that the moves have to be legal, and you have take turns.  My daughter has an entire wall of chess trophies, and my son really wants to sign up for one of the tournaments so he can get one too!  I just tell him that he can only earn trophies for understanding chess ideas and for working very hard!!

Also interesting is the step by step series