Teaching Primary Kids to play

Hi everyone, im working in a primary (or elementary) school at the moment and although ive played chess for a while, im ok but not that good against people on here, the kids are aged 9-11 and some haven't played much before or have been taught wrong by others.

Im hoping to train them mainly with the basics, ive had some great tips off one guy (thanks Craig) I played on here, just wondered if anyone had some tips on teaching kids to play? and what types of things to teach them?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks Dean

Teach them to never give up.  Too often they get frustrated and want to walk away.  Teach them that it's ok to lose, cuz that's how we learn.

Here's the system I used when teaching my daughter and nephew:

Start out using the Scholar's mate on them so that they lose in 4 moves.  When you play them again, USE THE EXACT SAME MOVES.  Keep doing it over and over until they realize that they have the ability to predict your next move, and start thinking about how to counter it.  This gets them thinking beyond the current move.

After they've figured out how to guard against Scholar's Mate, open yourself up to Fool's Mate over and over until they finally see it and take advantage of it.  I used to flip a coin twice before each game.  This would determine which of the 4 "sandbag" openings I would use (f3-g4, f4-g4, g4-f3, g4-f4 as white; f6-g5, f7-g5, g5-f6, g5-f7 as black).  I would say, "I promise to give you the OPPORTUNITY to check mate me.  You will have a 2 move head start, after which I will try to get myself out of trouble."

Because of this, my daughter was able to see an early mate and defeated some random user on Yahoo.  She was so excited that she immediately called me at work to tell me the good news.

I believe Grandmaster Susan Polgar does a lot of active work encouraging children to learn chess. She has a number of websites www.susanpolgar.com is one of them but there's also one at SPICE (Susan Polgar Institute For Chess Excellence) where she hosts a free 60+ page guide to teaching the basics of chess to children. It's in a pdf format and can be found here: -

http://www.depts.ttu.edu/spice/SPF_Training_Program_for_Teachers_4-19-08_SPICE.pdf

There should be plenty there to get you started I hope!

mike

I am not sure if I have any good suggestions to add, but I think it is a wonderful thing to do! I hope you and your students have fun with it.

Thanks for the help guys, i taught my first chess related lessons tuesday and yesterday and the kids absolutely loved it, their normal class teacher said they kept asking if they are doing it again!

Congrats deanobeano, what techniques did you employ in the end?  And the thing I was really wondering is- where on earth did you start?

Thanks broze, i got most of it from josefKs link its brilliant. Baiscally what i did was incorporate it into the maths lesson. Started with maths problems e.g how many squares on the board, simple way to work it out (8x8) what percentage is black squares etc. Then split the class into players and none players, non players were shown how the pawns move and played pawn wars (they loved this). Then the next day talked about the board its self (ranks files etc) and asked question like which piece starts on g8? then showed them some moves based on co-ordinates, e.g e4, nh6, e5 and got them to copy it then have a game and write down the moves and get another group to copy the moves based on the co-ordinates!