I think it's great what you're doing for the chess team. I too am slightly involved in a newly formed after school high school chess team (est. 08/2015) and think you've already got a great set of fundamentals started.
I'm not even as strong of a chess player as yourself, but I think I can help you in a few ways, given some more information. About how many students do you have interested in competing or at least coming after school? This is probably a big factor in the type and depth of lessons.
Something I would certainly address is chess etiquette. Simple things like the handshake, not slamming the clock, etc are not known by everyone. Also, different chess federations have different rules. As an example FIDE requires you to castle with 1 hand only and touch the clock with the same hand while USCF allows 2 handed castling. Even Hikaru Nakamura made this mistake back in September at the FIDE world cup. So know what rules the competition is going to be using beforehand.
Also, I noticed you're a diamond member. You could certainly use that to demonstrate tactics an unlimited number of times if you have a large screen and an HDMI or VGA output on your computer.
I would also encourage the joining of chess.com by the students and you to create a chess.com group for them to easily communicate with one another and increase their skills.
If students become less enthusiastic about the game you can try unique things to spice up the lesson. Something like splitting the number of students in half and having them complete a vote chess match against each another. Or maybe some type of 2 vs 2 similar to what the Sinquefield Cup does in "Ultimate Moves" (see them on youtube).
Hello everyone. I am a faculty advisor for the high school chess team where I work. We get together twice a week for lunch to play a game or two, but we just started an after-school training session for those interested in competing. I am not a very strong player, but most of the players are very much beginners and I wanted to offer meaningful lessons to them.
Today we discussed basic mistakes that people make in the opening. We talked about moving wing pawns, developing knights to the outside, queen sorties, moving pawns in front of the king, moving pieces twice, ignoring development and center control, as well as king safety and importance of castling.
Overall I think it went very well and we covered a lot of basic things that should help them start developing a strong opening game at least. We also asked them to choose e4 or d4 for white and learn some of the openings and to start considering responses from black.
It was a good start, but I want to develop a gameplan for this weekly meeting and thought I would reach out to the chess.com community (many of whom are much stronger players than myself) about some themes and ideas for beginner training. Here are a few thoughts I had for them:
Basic openings: Expanding and re-emphasizing the opening theory we covered already and going over some of the more common types of openings seen and very simple ideas related to them. (Queen's Gambit, Ruy Lopez, French, Italian, Sicilian, King's Gambit) I realize that if they can avoid simple mistakes and outright blunders in the opening, they don't really need to know specific ones, but I think they should at least make the effort to familiarize themselves with some of them.
Basic Tactics and Terms: We would go over what different types of tactics look like and how to recognize them (and name them). We would probably also go over a few puzzles using those themes and look at some other examples of pins they can see in a game.
Pawn Structures: Now I'm in nowhere a position to teach about this really, but we can go over some basics such as hanging pawns, doubled pawns, pawn chains, isolated pawns, passed pawns and such. We wouldn't get too specific, but at least give them some ideas on what to do and how to recognize holes, outposts and the like.
Notation and Analyzation: We have already been covering notation and the students are practicing it, but this would be about playing a game and then having them analyze it themselves, and try to spot weaknesses in their game.
Master's Game: I thought once in a while when we meet up, we can go through some historical game and talk ourselves through it, critically thinking each move and comparing our analysis to those of whatever master has annotated it already.
Any thoughts on if we're going in the right direction with this or what we might want to include in our lessons?