Many parents are leveraging online resources to teach their young children how to play chess, especially during this time when school and community chess clubs are meeting virtually. The online tools are so good that older children can learn how to play on their own, and parents can teach their young children, even if they do not know how to play chess themselves.
The primary tool we use is ChessKid.com, because it has excellent lessons designed specifically for children. Each lesson has a brief, fun video followed by interactive exercises so children can practice what they just learned. The interactive exercises for the introductory lessons have audio as well as text explanations so children who do not know how to read can still do them with help from their parents. The lessons follow a natural progression and are organized into levels beginning with the Pawn-level lessons which teach how the pieces move.
Children can then practice moving the pieces using the “Learn to Play” game in the free ChessKid app on iOS and Android devices. In this game, children keep moving a piece until they capture a star by landing on it.
Another good resource for learning and practicing the basics of chess is lichess.org/learn#/. Children can use this part of the lichess.org website without creating an account. This has a similar game where you move a piece to a star, but it has more advanced levels with multiple stars.
When there are several stars, children get more points by reaching all the stars in fewer moves; while they are practicing moving pieces, they are also starting to learn more advanced chess concepts, like visualization, planning, and evaluating alternatives. Even experienced players enjoy these exercises!
lichess.org Learn Chess Basics exercises
Once children learn these basics, it will be easier for them to participate in their chess club’s virtual meetings, and they will enjoy playing their friends using the ChessKid “Play vs. Kid” and “Puzzle Duel” features.
Please let us know if you are using other online resources to teach your young children how to play chess. You can do this by adding a comment to this blog post or by contacting us directly. Thank you!
Indermaur Chess Foundation 
For people who are playing chess, this words might sounds like reinventing a wheel. But there are a lot of adults who simply don’t know about the benefits od chess. Chess is a game that develops perceptiveness, imagination and the ability to focus on a specific task. The development of the brain’s left hemisphere which is responsible for logical thinking takes place through counting combinations, whereas the development of the right hemisphere, which is responsible for creative thinking, occurs by arranging new plans and finding new non-standard moves in different positions. For this matter you can use special diagrams, there are a lot of them to find over the internet. Bunch of them you will find in this lovely book – net-boss.org/chess-puzzles-for-kids-by-maksim-aksanov.
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