Gifted Homeschooling » Book Reviews

Resources for Teaching Chess

Jon — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 01:04:19 +0000

Teaching chess to a home school student can be a challenge. Most parents can teach the moves and maybe a bit of strategy, but then it falls apart. Local chess clubs, co-op chess classes, and private chess coaching are the usual route to continue learning chess. But with some good resources, parents can teach solid chess (and maybe even learn it themselves).

Most chess books are aimed at the experienced player. Even the childish-looking How to Beat Your Dad at Chess is beyond beginning players. I’ve found three books that are excellent for teaching younger players: Chess for Children, Better Chess for Young Players, and Batsford Chess Course. The Chess For Dummies and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Chess are also decent comprehensive books. Books by Susan Polgar, a female grandmaster, would be excellent for girls.

There are many excellent chess websites that offer articles, puzzles, and ways to play real opponents. One exceptional one for learning is ChessTempo, which dynamically rates players and puzzles so the player is offered puzzles at the appropriate difficulty. A bonus for kids is that you can see your score rise (or fall) as you work, so they continually get feedback on their efforts and can stay motivated to beat the scores of friends and family.

A great free chess tool is Winboard (and the bundled Crafty chess “engine”). Whenever you can’t understand where a game went wrong, playing through the game with analysis turned on is a tremendous help.

Eat This Not That!

Jon — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 23:55:01 +0000

Over the weekend we found this great book at Sam’s Club, Eat This Not That! for Kids!. It’s an awesome real-world guide to nutrition for today’s kids. It covers everything from picking the right breakfast cereal to which restaurant / fast food meals are better choices. It’s full of photos of actual products and meals to captivate visual learners.

Our daughter would not put it down and is actually getting a bit annoying criticizing everyone else’s food choices. That’s ok though. She’s had a few units nutrition and the food pyramid, but I don’t think she’s really understood the differences between real world food choices. How could she? Most adults don’t. The book might be a little light on emphasizing complete nutrition, whole grains, etc. especially if you’re really into nutrition, but if you’re a more typical family that doesn’t buy only organic and eats out from time to time, this should be a great fit.

The book is small enough to keep in the car so your gifted kid can drive you nuts every time you break down and hit the fast food drive-through. There is an adult version of the book.

Material World

Jon — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 11:13:53 +0000

Material World: A Global Family Portrait is an excellent book for sort of a general social studies unit. It explores daily life for an average family from each of 30 countries. Our daughter was just fascinated with the book. One Amazon reviewer mentioned that they used it for their college level course, but it’s more of a coffee table photo book, not a dry textbook.

Five of the family photos are available on the PBS Nova website. Nova’s World in the Balance: The Population Paradox show covers some of the same material but is more concerned with population growth.

DK has a similar book, A Life Like Mine, which is completely focused on the daily life of kids around the world. Our daughter has also read that book repeatedly. One Amazon reviewer did warn that, since it’s produced with UNICEF, it does emphasize the importance of vaccinations and school, which wasn’t acceptable to her. That’s not much of a concern for us, but it is for some home schoolers.