10 May 2015

S.Polgar Chess Curriculum

Having ended Chess Curriculum, my latest post in the 'Chess in School' series with '(To be continued...)', let's continue. The first open point was

No.2: Susan Polgar's FREE Chess Training Guide / Curriculum [...] I tried to find another copy of the Polgar material, but failed in the time I had available. I'll come back to this another time.

In fact I had already found a page titled Susan Polgar Foundation Training Program for Teachers (chessmaine.net), with a document titled 'Chess Training Program for Teachers'.

SPF_Training_Program_for_Teachers.pdf • 62 pages; dated 5 September 2006

It starts:-

Lesson 1
Lesson goals:
• Excite kids about the fun game of chess
• Relate the cool history of chess
• Incorporate chess with education: Learning about India and Persia
• Incorporate chess with education: Learning about the chess board and its coordinates
Who invented chess and why?
Talk about India / Persia – connects to Geography
Tell the story of "seed".

After browsing the document, I suspected that it was some sort of teachers' guide to be used together with another document that filled in the blanks. For example, given 'Relate the cool history of chess', the other document would have some details about that cool history. For this post I set off to find that other document and quickly discovered Susan Polgar Global Chess Daily News and Information - FREE Training Chess Guide for Parents and Teachers (chessdailynews.com):-

chess-training-guide.pdf • 65 pages; dated 19 April 2014

It starts:-

Lesson 1
Lesson goals:
• Excite kids about the fun game of chess
• Relate the cool history of chess
[same as above]

So there is no other document and I had the Polgar curriculum in hand the whole time. The three additional pages in the April 2014 version are a discussion about castling. Apologies to anyone who expected more from today's post. In my next post I'll look at No.5 in the 'Chess Curriculum' list which is (apparently) FIDE's curriculum.

No comments: