While I'm not a big fan of Chess, my husband is, so I figured I could at least teach my kids the basics! In the beginning, when the kids are just learning what each piece does, this learning activity could be done in about 5 minutes, but once you progress to playing Chess games, it takes much longer than 5 minutes (on the order of about 15-20 minutes or more) simply because Chess games do require a lot of thinking, which takes time.
Little Mr. was lucky to get Story Time Chess for his birthday, and it was a great way to teach a toddler how the pieces move in chess!
Story Time Chess
DEVELOPMENTAL MILESTONE REACHED: Your child can understand directions (such forward, backward, diagonal, 1 step / many steps)
DURATION: 5-10 minutes
MATERIALS USED:
Story Time Chess
1a) For the first 5-10 minute activity:
Read the story associated with the particular chess piece (in our case, Little Mr. and I alternated reading paragraphs).
Put that chess piece on the board and demonstrate how it can move.
Do Exercise 1 for that particular chess piece.
1b) After the first activity:
For the next 5-minute activities in the following days, just do the one exercise (step 3 above) until the toddler has mastered it (we didn't re-read the story every time). Once each exercise is mastered, move onto doing the next exercise for that chess piece until all the exercises for that chess piece is done.
Once the toddler finishes mastering all the exercises for 1 chess piece, move onto the story for the next chess piece and repeat 1a) and 1b)!
The final exercise in the Story Time Chess Storybook is to have all the pieces on the board with the goal of capturing the other team's king, which is an actual game of chess! At that point, we reduced our chess activity from every day to once every other day, and eventually down to once a week so that we could make time for other learning activities.
One concept that helped Little Mr. play a little more effectively was that of "protecting" pieces he didn't want to lose, or that he was in danger of losing, with another one of his chess pieces.
I am by no means a chess player, but here is (most of) the footage of one of our chess games, where he got me in the end!
Story Time Chess also comes with a Crown Card Game, but I wasn't the biggest fan of that game because it doesn't really help teach the toddler how to achieve the goal of capturing the other king: it purely focuses on how the pieces move. At first, Little Mr. preferred the games where we tried to get each other's kings, but because it would take longer and longer, he started to prefer the Crown Card Game which I didn't think was helping him with his critical thinking skills. So I don't think I'm going to introduce the Crown Card Game to Copycat once he's old enough for this activity unless he specifically asks for it. I'm hoping that once Copycat is able to play too, he and Little Mr. will be able to play with each other to boost each other's critical thinking skills!
After a while, I also tried subscribing to "Story Time Chess at Home" for a month to get an idea of how to teach Little Mr. Chess strategy: I'll write about that soon!
Comentarios