My 5-year-old daughter, who is reasonably smart but not “scary smart,” started playing CrossFingers on my phone a few months back. She instantly declared it to be her favorite game ever, and would literally spend hours figuring out the trickier levels. After seeing her attention span and spacial reasoning abilities in action, I dusted off my competition chess set from high school and taught her how to play. She’s now declared chess to be her new favorite game ever. I bought her a book by Pandolfini with basic strategy and a bunch of puzzles that we’ve been going through, and we play for about an hour every night when I’m home. It’s been a couple months and she doesn’t hate it yet
Teaching her how to play, I was reminded of why I liked chess as a kid, which is that there’s lots of cool pieces, and they interacted in my head like Battle Chess. So she does spend most of the time making the pawns whisper to each other and cry out for help when they’re in trouble, while creating equally entertaining personalities to her other pieces. She’s 5, after all. I’m not trying to train a grandmaster here, this is just something fun for us to do together.
Long story short, last night she asked, “What else can we do that’s about chess besides playing chess.” She hinted that she wants a chess picture for her room, for instance. I told her I knew of some chess movies, by which I meant “Searching for Bobby Fischer” and nothing else, although wikipedia has a list of movies I’ve mostly never heard of.
I saw Queen To Play twice in the theater and it’s delightful. It may be a bit old for her but I don’t remember there being anything inappropriate in it. It’s about a middle-aged hotel maid in Corsica who sees an obviously-in-love couple playing chess on the balcony while she’s cleaning their room. She’s married to a good man but her life has gotten a bit, well, same old, same old. She buys her husband an electronic chess set for his birthday in hopes that it’ll be something they can learn and do together. He’s not interested though, so she learns on her own. She finds she has a knack for it and quickly outgrows the basic beginner instructions and turns to a crabby client (Kevin Kline) whose house she cleans on the side to make extra money. He has a great chess set and becomes her teacher, though she quickly passes him by. It’s strictly a platonic relationship, so no worries about it getting steamy.
Hold on a minute, I just remembered that the movie is in French with subtitles. Show it to your daughter when she’s ready for subtitles and she might get into French too. Besides the chess, one of the things I fell in love with was the glorious, breathtaking scenery of Corsica. It’s so grand and magnificent.
There was a concert version on PBS a while back that was pretty good. Don’t know if it’s available elsewhere. Nothing staged that I’m aware of. But. Good luck getting a five year old to sit through it. I’m…several multiples of five, and like chess, and have problems lasting the whole way through.
I’d definitely suggest making a chess set. I made a wooden chessboard with my grandpa, who died a several years back, and it’s one of my favorite memories of spending time with him. And I’ll likely be able to give the board to my kids someday, assuming I have any.
I remember seeing Knights of the South Bronx, a movie about inner-city kids learning to play competitive chess. Typical TV movie, white middle class savior to a bunch of poor blacks. But inspiring, I guess. She’d get to see other elementary school kids play chess.
There are a lot of books and stories in which a game of chess forms a backdrop against the story, which mirrors the moves. Besides the aforementioned Alice books (in which there are very definite moves set out, although not very profound ones, which Carroll explicitly points out. see Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice), there are several stories I’ve encountered. Isaac Asimov wrote one, in which he took the game from a book of Great Chess Games. I can’t recall its title, nor those of any of the others, unfortunately.
