Thinking With Chess: Teaching Children Ages 5-14

What’s the best way to teach chess to children? Thinking with Chess: Teaching Children Ages 5-14 is a handbook for teachers, librarians, after-school instructors, chess coaches, counselors, and parents that requires no prior knowledge of the game. Both novices and veteran chess players can use its innovative lesson plans for teaching groups of children.

InThinking with Chess, Dr. Alexey Root connects chess with skills important to academic success, such as classifying, pattern recognition, decoding, creating, and predicting. The book also introduces challenges for practicing divergent thinking and puzzles for convergent thinking.

Thinking with Chess teaches not only the fundamentals of chess - the chessmen and how they move, how to keep score, and where to play - but also tools useful in winning games, such as double check and smothered checkmate.
About the author

Alexey W. Root was the 1989 U.S. Women’s Chess Champion and is a Woman International Master. She has a Ph.D. in education from UCLA and is the author of five previous books on chess in education. Thinking with Chess: Teaching Children Ages 5-14 is her first book for Mongoose Press.

Dr. Root is a senior lecturer in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at The University of Texas at Dallas (UT Dallas). From 1999 to 2003, she served as associate director of the UT Dallas Chess Program, home to one of the top college chess teams in the world. Root currently teaches Chess Online courses for college credit via UT Dallas eLearning. She lives in Denton, Texas.