Learning Chess Workbook Step 2

The step-by-step method has been developed by Rob Brunia and Cor van Wijgerden to teach children to play chess. A large number of schools and chess clubs in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Austria use this method for their chess lessons.

This method consists of six steps. Each step is accompanied with an instruction book with the teaching material to be used by the trainer / teacher / parent and a workbook with exercises for the students.

Step 2
The 'real' work begins in the second step. After the rules of the game and the basic skills from the previous step, the first principles of tactics and positional play are on the program now.
We are going to teach attacking techniques and how to win material in a clever way.

Tactics are very important in playing chess. The tactical possibilities seen by advanced chess players originate from good positional play; in the case of the students of step two they come out of thin air. At this level all games are decided by tactics, so it is logical to pay a lot of attention to this matter.

Positional play is still less important at this level than tactics. The problem is that to introduce even the most simple positional concepts is aiming too high. This introduction is made in the second step, but at the beginning it is better to point out the positional elements when analysing the children's games.

Workbook Step 2
Next to the exercises there are reminders in the workbook. These are short recapitulations of the material from the manual for the students. There are 9 reminders. 

• Activity of pieces 
• Targets of attack 
• Double attack: queen 
• The pin 
• Eliminating of the defence 
• The 3 golden rules 
• Discovered attack 
• Defending against mate
• The short notation

On the remaining 46 pages there are always 12 diagrams a page. That means a total number of 46x12-26 ( the drawings) = 526 positions.