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At the National Scholastic Chess Foundation, our belief is that the benefits of teaching chess to children go far beyond their time spent in front of a chessboard. Through chess, students hone their critical thinking, deductive reasoning, and strategic planning aptitudes. Chess improves focus and teaches children to stay on task. But we recognize that not all are instantly enamored with the game.
The idea behind our book “Great Moves: Learning Chess Through History” is cross-curricular, or multi-disciplinary, learning. A growing discussion in education is focused on promoting “deeper learning” for students. Most students are taught by sampling bits of information (a little math, a little history, some vocabulary). As education author Ben Johnson puts it: “Deep learning is like taking a long draught from a well of knowledge as opposed to only sipping from many different wells.”
The blending of concepts builds and reinforces stronger connections between them. We know that one of the keys to creating a willingness to learn is by establishing the value of the knowledge to the learner, whether that value is immediate or sometime in the future. We do this by making connections to what the learner already knows and then establishing relationships between the base knowledge and the new information we wish to impart. We find the value connection and a way to apply the new information in the real world, so the data is not just memorized and then forgotten, but put to actual use. This applies to every subject one might wish to teach.
For the student who is more interested in stories, we hope Great Moves will teach students how to improve and excel at chess by setting the playing of chess against the backdrop of the game’s illustrious history. Our storytelling provides context and adds “stickiness” to the lessons.
For the student who already enjoys chess, our goal is to motivate applying that passion to other disciplines, be it math and science or literature and the arts. Of course, we have to get these students to be open to this idea and we do that by sharing how studying the history of chess can help improve their playing ability. As we quote in the beginning of the book, Grandmaster and former world champion Dr. Max Euwe once shared that, “The history of chess (under its present rules) is the study of growth and gradual change of the strategic ideas of leading players of succeeding generations. Taking note of this evolution and thoroughly grasping it is the very thing which makes for better judgment and an increase in playing strength. The development of a chess player runs parallel with chess itself, a study of the history of playing methods therefore has great practical value.”
For all students, the most important subject to master is the ability to read and comprehend. They can then teach themselves whatever subjects they might become interested in throughout their lives. It might have been an easier task, and more in keeping with some educator advice we received at the beginning of this project, to make several shorter books and simplify the writing. But we wanted something that was both comprehensive and challenging. The book is Lexile-scored at 1050 so it should be accessible to anyone with a reading level of 6th grade and above.[/read]
Great Moves: Learning Chess Through History is written in 5 parts that begin with the origins of chess and continue through the late 1800s; the chess instruction goes from a review of beginning concepts, presented in the context of when the idea was first published or popularized, and advances to feature some of the great games of the Romantic era of chess. The text has been designed as a cross-curricular course where we teach chess and social studies together. Of course, we are also encouraging reading.
Great Moves has been evaluated by MetaMetrics using The Lexile Framework for Reading. The book scored 1050L, which translates to a middle school reading level. We recommend a minimum of 5th grade. We have tested the material extensively with younger children who love the stories, but most will not be able to read the book independently. For younger grades, Great Moves is more of a teacher manual than a self-study text. For everyone else, we hope they find the book interesting and accessible.
In addition to scoring the entire text, we took the 5 parts and broke each into 2 sections. Using the Lexile Power V Vocabulary Tool, we built 10 vocabulary lists (most are 20 words). Knowing these words will help ensure that the reader understands the content.
Attached you will find the word lists. Each covers approximately 30 pages of the book. You can review both vocabulary lists for Part 1. Chess Origins and Development, for example, at the beginning of the section, or you can break Part 1 into 2 sections and introduce the second vocabulary list around page 43.
The words in the lists have some blanks where letters have been left out. In his book “Learn Better,” Ulrich Boser shares the importance of making learning “active,” even if it is as simple as working through a word list. “The power of mentally doing – of creating value in an area of expertise – is clear in basic memory tasks…. People are far more likely to recall [a word] if a letter is missing from the word when they read it. When people add the [missing letter], they’re completing the word. They’re finishing the thought and in the most basic of ways, they’ve done some work to produce their learning – and thus make it more meaningful.”
So, we have the words with a letter, or letters, missing, and the definitions on the front of a page and the properly spelled words on the back.
We recommend also saying the words out loud. How can one claim to truly know a word, if he or she cannot pronounce it!
Then, as further reinforcement, each word list has also been made into a crossword puzzle. Teachers should have the student complete the vocabulary list and say the words, and then give the crossword later, perhaps as homework. Have the student keep his or her vocabulary sheet. Unlike most crosswords where there is smaller puzzle with the answers on the back of the page, our puzzles require the student to go back to the vocabulary list and check off any words they might not have been able to fill in based on the clues (definitions) alone. Again, we want the students to be “active” learners.
In addition to general vocabulary, we have 2 chess word lists, also with crossword puzzles. These lists are comprised of the words that appear in bold throughout the book. With these, we did not leave blank letters. These lists may be kept aside as a handy glossary when working with Great Moves or other chess instructional material. ChessWords-1 covers all the terms in Part 1 of the book (the “basics”). ChessWords-2 takes up terms from the remainder of the book.
In our “A Note to Students” section we include advice for the student to look up any word or words that he or she does not understand in a dictionary. It is amazing to me when I visit schools and there are no dictionaries in the classroom. It is OK to use online dictionaries, but please encourage your students to be sure they understand the words they are reading.
Be sure to have the students read the “A Note to Students” section; it helps establish why he or she will be studying Great Moves. We know that the subjects that engage us are ones we value, and an important way to establish that value is to answer why.
Finally, as students work through the history portions of the book, they will be asked comprehension questions. They can answer on the lines provided. The answers do not have to be long but we recommend encouraging students to answer in complete sentences. A key to attaining college and career readiness is having the ability to communicate clearly, so your encouragement can be most helpful. [/read]
Each link below will download a zip folder with multiple PDFs in each folder.
General Vocabulary & Chess Words for Part 1
Chess Words for Parts 2 through 5
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We all know it can be a challenge getting students to review material they feel they already know. But in chess, we regularly re-approach the same concepts trying to make them become as automatic as if we had taught driving a bike. So the first step is to explain to students why we review and review and review. We want this information to be instantly available without thinking. We want to keep the analytical thinking part of our brain for tough new problems, and make as much information available from memory as we possibly can. Part 1 of Great Moves, for students who already know a fair amount of chess, is a review of basic concepts, but interestingly we are presenting these concepts from the very first times we see them published. So we see the first publication of the Scholar’s Mate (that we know of) from 1614 or we learn the Fegetello with a quick introduction to Polerio, a name not so instantly recognized by younger players.
In piloting Great Moves, one of our tests was in a summer camp program run by the National Scholastic Chess Foundation. In each of the four weeks of camp, we featured a different section from the book as “bonus” material that then drove our discussions to the evolution of these concepts to more modern play.
Each camp had several children who were at a more beginner level. These students were introduced to the concepts from Part 1, but with many more practice examples and lots of review of developing pieces and of basic checkmating patterns.
For tournament players coming to camp, they want to focus just on play. The stories are covered rather more quickly than we might like when we want to do more than just develop chess skill. But again, these children have committed to a week-long chess camp (sometimes coming for multiple weeks) because they want to get better at chess in a real hurry. Each week we focused on a different time period and key player from history. So in week 1, for example, we worked through Part 2 exploring the many advances made by Philidor, and then discovering how his ideas relate to playing today. More modern games that tie in to his ideas can be found in this great article by Grandmaster Bryan Smith at chess.com, which begins with the Captain Smith vs. Philidor game (London, 1790) we feature in the book (p.107). Your own searches of the players and concepts should lead to similar resources.[/read]
The concept of a mating net is taught at the very beginning of “Great Moves: Learning Chess Through History” (p. 32) with examples given throughout the book. We see one created by Paul Murphy in his game against Johann Löwenthal that begins on p. 281. Here’s another, this one taken from a game played by Paul Morphy as part of his 1858 blindfold exhibition in Paris. A favorite game for both Alan and Sunil, while it did not make it into the book, we thought it made a nice bonus for you to study on your own or to share with your students.
©2017, 2024 NSCF: The National Scholastic Chess Foundation