Chess for Children: How to Play the World's Most Popular Board Game Hardcover – April 1, 2004

Bought this for my first grade grandson who want to joint the chess team! His mother reports that he is fascinated with the book and very focused on the diagrams.

I gave this book to my grandson for his 9th birthday. He has been playing around with a chess board for over a year with surprising skill and minimal instruction. This book contains excellent illustrations and instructions that he can read and understand is just what he needed to fine tune his game! It was helpful to me too, a beginner chess player! Chess is a wonderful mind game, full of strategy and abstract concepts and introducing it to children is a great gift.

I bought this to teach a kindergartner how to play. As I worked through it, I found it easier and more effective to just teach him straight ahead.In other words, I walked him through the name and function of each piece. I explained the board and piece layout. I explained castling and en passant. He got it.The exercises are good, but I used the book for ideas and for a sense of curriculum. That's why I give it four stars.While the book may have been used differently than I expected, it served my goal: to teach a young one chess.Anthony Trendlanthonytrendl.com

Chess game instructions made easy to understand; even for adults like me! Very basic Chess game instructions/review that are concise and to the point; even my 6 yr old understands. I didn't realize that Chess teaches algebra, as this is great for younger children as they get exposed to higher levels of math, and don't even realize because the game is so fun !

I want to teach my nine year old granddaughter to play chess but I haven't played myself since high school, so I needed my own refresher in order to be able to instruct her correctly. This book teaches the game so much better than I could do on my own. It introduces the moves of the different pieces and the game strategy in small bites; never more than a young person can grasp at once. And it has abundant illustrations, so your young player can visualize the concept being introduced. And the sequence of new material makes perfect sense. So logical! Really glad I found this book. It's a bargain, and fun to boot. Highly recommend.

I just received this book and have spent about an hour looking through it. I'd been intending to give it to my niece and two nephews (11, 9, & 5 yrs old) but after being initially charmed by the illustrations and impressed by its comprehensiveness, I'm now having second thoughts. As has been noted in some of the other reviews, there's a real disparity between the book's packaging and its reading level. The illustrations, typeface, and page size certainly look like those of a children's primer, but the text actually reads like a CliffsNotes guide to the game, with liberal use of "i.e." and chess jargon that is often under-explained, or as in the case of "control" and "develop", never defined at all. The problem is most acute in the final 20 pages, a rushed, confusing, and (I imagine) intimidating introduction to openings and strategy. Pedagogically, what really differentiates much of this book from more adult-oriented tutorials is its terseness. Topics that would typically rate four or five pages in a book like "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Chess" are condensed to one, with most of the explanation appearing as captions to arrow-filled diagrams.I suspect that publishers of children's books feel a need to keep their page counts down. Perhaps they think that expecting a nine-year-old to read more than a hundred pages about a topic like chess is just too much to ask. They might be right -- I don't know -- but the answer in that case is to market something that covers less of the game and in a more gentle fashion.

This is a great (and fun) way to teach kids Chess! We rented "Searching For Bobby Fischer" and watched it with our 10yr. old twins. They loved it! I bought the kindle version of this book and put it on their Kindle HD's and then found a cool Chess app to go with it. This book taught them far more about Chess than I ever remembered learning and it did it in a way that was fun and easy for them to understand. I highly recommend it!

I started teaching my son chess when he was almost 4 and got this after his 4th birthday. It's fun, easy to follow and perfect for a beginner since it starts with the very basics and then goes into more complicated topics all while maintaining a light, conversational tone that is not intimidating for a child. In fact, I think that this is also a good book for any adult who is not familiar with the game since so many instructional chess books are unbearably dry and dull.