Learning Chess - Workbook Step 1 Board book – January 1, 2009

The picture included is a completed page by my son when he was eight years old. The Step Method is a great program to make sure, when teaching kids, nothing is missed from the fundamentals. I have my sons do a page a day and it is the foundation for thier training. My kids are better at chess than all the kids in thier class at school, and this is the program they use to stay ahead. They also go to chess tournaments, and while they are only "average" among other kids competing, be sure that those parents are also training thier kids. A very well thought out progression of puzzles to elevate anyones play.

Chess Steps is a structured training approach that is mainly used in the Netherlands. It is the only training program that trains total beginners to expert and master titles.I purchased this for my 6 year old niece. I found the exercises excellent for beginning players. However, a few pages in, it got a bit too challenging. However, I think they would be perfect for 8 year olds.As a result, we've paused training with this book, and instead are using the more age appropriate stepping stone books from the same publisher, which are more age appropriate for a 6 year old.

This is just the workbook and does not include the answer key so it’s not useful unless you are able to find the answer key as well but I couldn’t find that on Amazon. I ended up returning for another book that had chess puzzles and answers included.

Updated: I was suggested this collection by a number of people. Even though I'm an adult learner, and this collection is originally geared towards school children, there is a lot to learn from it as an adult. There is a large number of exercises and they all are very clever...forcing you to also develop your board vision. The publisher updated its website, making availbale for download the correct answer sheet for each workbook edition, solving the biggest issue I had with the workbook before. Now I update my review from 4 to 5 stars.

The book came in an envelop, which was apparently folded during shipping. The book was much thinner than I had expected. As a result, there are a lot of wrinkles on the book when it arrived. The content was OK, but the publisher apparently tried to save pages. They put in so many puzzles per page, and each of them was printed in very small size. Not fun to read, particularly for young children. Feels like that it is not a book, but some kind of school handout.