Best way to teach child tactics?

Sort:
verdantlife

My 9-year-old stepdaughter plays chess and tied for fourth in a local regional tournament.  No trophy for fourth place - and she really wants a trophy ;-)

She'd like to improve and having watched her games, most of the time she's either falling into tactical traps or not exploiting her opponent's errors.  Keep in mind we're talking typical 9-year-olds - try for Scholar's Mate is the opening repertoire for about 1/3 of the kids she plays ;-)

I think if she got brushed up on tactics a bit, her game would improve immensely.

  • Can anyone recommend a book for kids?  She is not really the kind of kid to sit in her room and go through a book, so it'd be something I'd go through with her. 
  • Even better would be some sort of teacher's course plan on tactics.  I am far from a tactical master, but am familiar with all the themes.
  • I do have Convekta's Chess Tactics for Beginners (originally for me, not her LOL), Chessmaster, etc.  If there is other good courseware, please recommend.  Again, ideally something we can do together.
baronspam

Two free resources online-

Professorchess.com is a site aimed at scholastic players.  It has a number of exercises, including one where they have to find all the legal caputres and checks in a postion.  Good for developing "vision".  It also has an endgame area that teaches basic mates.

Chesstempo.com is another free site, a little more advanced, that will give you unlimited tactical problems.  It also has endgame problems, but if you are on a non-premium account you are limited to two endgames per day.  If you create an account and log in it tracks your progess and gives you problems suitable for your skill.  Some are as simple as finding the hanging piece or basic mate threats.

LearnChess

Tactics Trainer is one

http://www.chess.com/tactics/problems.html

You can view the problems (without affecting the rating and you can't solve them yourself by moving the pieces, but you can click on the arrows to show the next move in the puzzle). Just make sure to sort by rating and/or percentage rate that solved it.

http://chesstempo.com/chess-problems.html

This site usually has some very easy tactics, though some are thrown in there that can be tough if you were to keep solving puzzles. There is a page that even goes over the different types of tactics.

http://gameknot.com/chess-puzzles.pl

This has some pretty good puzzles, though some are pretty out there with like 20 queens and stuff, but most seem to be regular type of tactical problems. The problems are rated by the number of stars assigned to it from the users between 1-5 with 5 being the hardest.