7 Chess Activities to do with Kids At Home
Do you need to keep your kids entertained and productive while they’re at home? While it’s important to keep your kids learning traditional academic subjects like math, reading and science, it’s equally important to change things up and keep things fun! This is especially true during times like this, when the world is learning to adapt to a new normal.
This is our new normal. What does yours look like?
What kind of stay at home activities can keep kids engaged at home? And can they be self sufficient while doing this activity while continuing to learn?
Top Chess Activities to do at Home
- Learn to Play Chess
- Chess Lessons
- Learn with your kids
- Challenge the bot
- Puzzles, your miniature science lab!
- Connect with friends and enjoy tournaments
- Play over the board chess
Learn to play chess
Nothing beats a good ol’ fashioned game of chess. Teach them the ancient game! Or let them learn how to play it on their own.
Kaiden and Jordan take on ChessKid bots
Chess is timeless. Chess engages brains and makes kids smarter. It even teaches life skills like patience, accountability for one’s actions, and sportsmanship.
Whether your family is managing a single child household or one with multiple kids, chess is the perfect way to keep them occupied while learning a skill they can enjoy for a lifetime. Plus it frees up busy parents to continue working from home. For a single child household, learning how to play on chesskid.com is a great way for them to learn at their own pace. ChessKid will adapt to the child’s strength and keep the difficulty just right.
Enjoy chess lessons by funmaster Mike
Going through our lessons is a surefire way to engage them right away. Funmaster Mike is one of the world’s most beloved chess teachers, for good reason. I work with him everyday, and he actually IS that funny! Many kids have told us that they feel like he’s right there teaching them as they laugh at his witty (and sometimes corny) jokes. Even adults enjoy his videos.
Learn alongside your kids
In many ways, busy parents are now also taking on the task of being homeschool teachers, too. If you want to participate and learn right along with your kids, I’d highly recommend our Classroom Planner. Even if you’re completely new to chess, you can facilitate and learn right along with Funmaster Mike and your kids.
Class lessons designed to teach complete rules of chess
Challenge our bot personalities
Once the kids have built up some knowledge, they can jump right in and challenge our bots. Bots are great because they start off fairly easy and enable kids to build up their confidence before jumping to a new bot. Right now, we have ten bot personalities. But hint, hint...we’re going to be adding a lot more in the future!
Choose your bot opponent with 10 skill levels
Puzzles, your miniature science lab!
If they want to stretch their brains, puzzles are a fantastic way. Many coaches swear by puzzles as the best way for kids to make rapid chess improvement. And kids love solving puzzles.
You can think of each chess puzzle like a mini science experiment. Hypothesize, experiment, confirm and solve! Ann and Kaiden like solving a few puzzles together before winding down for bed. ChessKid has 100,000 of them and counting, and they’re each adapted to your child’s progress.
Puzzles adapt to each child's skill level
Connect with friends and enjoy tournaments
ChessKid keeps things ‘gamified fresh’ by enabling your kids to challenge each other to a live game online. They can even stay connected to their friends by joining the same virtual chess club, challenge each other to live games, or even play in tournaments that you can easily organize!
Multiple 'play' options to keep your kids learning.
Tournaments are popular to experience competition with other children
Play over the board chess
Of course, nothing truly beats the magical feeling of using a pawn to capture an almighty rook. Over the board chess will never go out of style. I highly recommend it!
Hard to beat a real over the board game experience!
Our family feels particularly fortunate during this day and age. We’re a family of gamers. Whether it’s Catan, Mariokart, Magic the Gathering, Risk, we have a host of activities that can keep us entertained for hours.
But any family can enjoy chess. And while I’m admittedly (and proudly) biased, chess is one of the best skills your child can learn while they’re at home. Do your kids, and yourselves a favor. Teach them a skill that lasts a lifetime. Teach them chess!
Are you ready for the challenge?