Learning Chess Workbook Step 3

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 3
To proceed with the third step the knowledge from step two is indispensable, but apart from that step three is not really difficult. The tactics issues are relatively easy and also the lessons about defending against tactics should not cause any problems. Only trapping is a bit tricky. It can be compared to mating but now instead of the king another piece is the victim.

Furthermore, attention is being paid to the first pawn endgames. For some students it is a child's play but for those who have still problems with the control of space it is a tough struggle. In this step we begin to teach the supporting skills.

One of them is ´thinking ahead´. The student calculates in his head the possibilities and visualizes ( tries to imagine) the new situation which arises on the chess board. The command of this skill can differ enormously per student.|

Workbook Step 3
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 12 reminders:
 
• Discovered and double check 
• Attack on a pinned piece 
• Access and mating patterns 
• Pawn ending: the square of the pawn 
• Eliminating of the defence 
• Defending against the double attack 
• Draw 
• X-ray 
• Defending against the pin 
• Mobility 
• Key squares
• A pinned piece is not a good defender

On the remaining 43 pages there are always 12 diagrams a page. That means a total number of 43x12-27 (the drawings )= 489 positions.