Teaching Kids to Play Chess

Studies have shown that kids who take up chess improve their test scores and tend to do well academically. Additionally, our years of experience have shown us that the principles of discipline, planning and understanding consequences that kids learn through Chess benefit their lives in other positive ways besides school work.

Chess has also been shown to help kids with behavioural issues. The kids may think they are just having fun, but we know that they learn a lot more than just how to play the world’s greatest game.

Chess has been touted for centuries as a way of educating the mind in preparation for life. The same is true today: Googling “Chess in Education” results in 998,000 hits. Interest in chess as an educational tool began in 1779, when Benjamin Franklin wrote:

“The Game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement; several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired and strengthened by it, so as to become habits ready on all occasions.

For life is a kind of Chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and ill events that are, in some degree, the effect of prudence, or the want of it. By playing at Chess, then, we may learn foresight, circumspection and caution.”