Lesson 1. 5/20/23
The first lesson. The board and pieces, captures, pawns v pieces games, chess mazes.
I’ve written about this a little, my interest in teaching chess. Well today was the first day I ever gave a chess lesson!
It went amazingly well. Students are old friends, a mother and daughter, whom we don’t see that often. It was for fun. A marathon session, almost 3 hours — so more like 3 or 5 lessons. Once or twice the daughter (12) zoned out a little , but given the length of the lesson, this was totally understandable! I kept looking for signs of losing steam, but they just kept going.
It was funny to think that we worked for hours without saying a word about endgames, openings or tactics!
Sketching out what we did, before I forget:
The board and how the pieces move, names of squares, ranks and files, orienting the board with a light square in the bottom right corner (h1 and a8), queen gets her color, etc.
The relative value of the pieces, and how they are stronger in the center, the idea of happy pieces
Which pieces can be captured, etc. from Elizabeth Spiegel. Did this a few times, moving the pieces around, noting who protects whom. If you don’t know Elizabeth, she’s a major character in the documentary Brooklyn Castle - a fantastic chess teacher and coach. Worth watching, if you can find a place to stream it. Also, here’s a great piece she wrote on books that are great resources for teaching chess.
Exercise: king v king, students start their kings from the home square and try to get to the other side of the board first - introduced ideas of opposition and outflanking
Exercise: 5 pawns v rook, chessplus.net has several great chess mini games for teaching, which also come with instructional videos. Recommended.
Exercise: 3 pawns v bishop. Also from chessplus.net.
Chess maze from Bruce Albertson’s Chess Mazes 1. Rook maze, move the rook to where it can check the king, taking care to not move it to a square that is attacked. Chess mazes are great for learning to pay attention to which squares are not safe, and making a plan (to get to the final square where check is delivered). Students enjoyed doing a couple of these.
Reviewing the material: (Robert Martinez videos, below). Robert is a born teacher. He covered almost exactly the same material I did, however he mentioned that the knight is able to jump over other pieces - something I neglected to mention!